WHY BOTH THE HOBBESIAN AND ROUSSEAUIAN VERSIONS OF HUMAN HISTORY HAVE DIRE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS

为什么霍布斯和卢梭的人类历史版本都有可怕的政治影响？

The political implications of the Hobbesian model need little elaboration. It is a foundational assumption of our economic system that humans are at base somewhat nasty and selfish creatures, basing their decisions on cynical, egoistic calculation rather than altruism or co-operation; in which case, the best we can hope for are more sophisticated internal and external controls on our supposedly innate drive towards accumulation and self-aggrandizement. Rousseau’s story about how humankind descended into inequality from an original state of egalitarian innocence seems more optimistic (at least there was somewhere better to fall from), but nowadays it’s mostly deployed to convince us that while the system we live under might be unjust, the most we can realistically aim for is a bit of modest tinkering. The term ‘inequality’ is itself very telling in this regard.

霍布斯模式的政治含义无需赘言。这是我们经济体系的一个基本假设，即人类根本上是有些讨厌和自私的生物，他们的决定是基于愤世嫉俗、利己主义的计算，而不是利他主义或合作；在这种情况下，我们所能希望的是对我们所谓天生的积累和自我膨胀的动力进行更复杂的内部和外部控制。卢梭关于人类如何从最初的平等主义的纯真状态堕入不平等的故事似乎更乐观（至少有更好的地方可供堕落），但如今它主要被用来说服我们，虽然我们生活的系统可能是不公正的，但我们最现实的目标是进行一些小的修补。在这方面，“不平等” 这个词本身就很有说服力。

Since the financial crash of 2008, and the upheavals that followed, the question of inequality – and with it, the long-term history of inequality – have become major topics for debate. Something of a consensus has emerged among intellectuals and even, to some degree, the political classes that levels of social inequality have got out of hand, and that most of the world’s problems result, in one way or another, from an ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. Pointing this out is in itself a challenge to global power structures; at the same time, though, it frames the issue in a way that people who benefit from those structures can still find ultimately reassuring, since it implies no meaningful solution to the problem would ever be possible.

自 2008 年的金融风暴和随后的动荡以来，不平等问题 —— 以及随之而来的不平等的长期历史 —— 已经成为辩论的主要议题。在知识分子中，甚至在某种程度上，在政治阶层中，已经出现了某种共识，即社会不平等的程度已经失控，世界上的大多数问题都是由富人和穷人之间不断扩大的鸿沟以这样或那样的方式造成的。指出这一点本身就是对全球权力结构的挑战；但与此同时，它以一种从这些结构中受益的人仍然可以找到最终放心的方式来框定这个问题，因为它暗示着这个问题不可能有任何有意义的解决方案。

After all, imagine we framed the problem differently, the way it might have been fifty or 100 years ago: as the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like ‘inequality’ sounds like it’s practically designed to encourage half-measures and compromise. It’s possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminated inequality’?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.

毕竟，想象一下，我们以不同的方式来框定这个问题，它可能是 50 年或 100 年前的方式：作为资本的集中，或寡头垄断，或阶级权力。与这些相比，像 “不平等” 这样的词听起来就像它实际上是为了鼓励半途而废和妥协的。可以想象推翻资本主义或打破国家的权力，但不清楚，消除不平等意味着什么。（哪种不平等？财富？机会？人们到底要有多平等，我们才可以说我们已经 “消除了不平等”？）“不平等” 一词是一种适合技术官僚改革者时代的社会问题框架方式，他们从一开始就假设没有真正的社会转型愿景存在。

Debating inequality allows one to tinker with the numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (‘Can you imagine? The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population own 44 per cent of the world’s wealth!’) – but it also allows one to do all this without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such ‘unequal’ social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others; or that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The last, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality; and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society. Presumably it will always be with us. It’s just a matter of degree.

关于不平等的辩论使人们可以对数字进行修补，争论基尼系数和功能障碍的阈值，重新调整税收制度或社会福利机制，甚至用显示事情变得多么糟糕的数字来震惊公众（“你能想象吗？世界上最富有的 1% 的人口拥有世界上 44% 的财富！”） —— 但它也允许人们做这一切，而不去解决人们实际上反对这种 “不平等” 社会安排的任何因素：例如，一些人设法将他们的财富变成对其他人的权力；或者其他人最终被告知他们的需求并不重要，他们的生活没有内在价值。最后一种情况，我们应该相信，只是 “不平等” 的必然结果；而 “不平等” 是生活在任何大型、复杂、城市、技术先进的社会中的必然结果。据推测，它将永远伴随着我们。这只是一个程度问题。

Today, there is a veritable boom of thinking about inequality: since 2011, ‘global inequality’ has regularly featured as a top item for debate in the World Economic Forum at Davos. There are inequality indexes, institutes for the study of inequality, and a relentless stream of publications trying to project the current obsession with property distribution back into the Stone Age. There have even been attempts to calculate income levels and Gini coefficients for Palaeolithic mammoth hunters (they both turn out to be very low).¹ It’s almost as if we feel some need to come up with mathematical formulae justifying the expression, already popular in the days of Rousseau, that in such societies ‘everyone was equal, because they were all equally poor.’

今天，关于不平等的思考有一个名副其实的热潮：自 2011 年以来，“全球不平等” 经常成为达沃斯世界经济论坛的首要辩论项目。有不平等指数，有研究不平等问题的机构，还有源源不断的出版物，试图将目前对财产分配的痴迷推回到石器时代。甚至还有人试图计算收入水平和旧石器时代猛犸象猎人的基尼系数（结果都很低）。¹这几乎就像我们觉得有必要拿出数学公式来证明在卢梭时代已经流行的说法，即在这样的社会中 “人人平等，因为他们都同样贫穷。”

The ultimate effect of all these stories about an original state of innocence and equality, like the use of the term ‘inequality’ itself, is to make wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense: the natural result of viewing ourselves through history’s broad lens. Yes, living in a truly egalitarian society might be possible if you’re a Pygmy or a Kalahari Bushman. But if you want to create a society of true equality today, you’re going to have to figure out a way to go back to becoming tiny bands of foragers again with no significant personal property. Since foragers require a pretty extensive territory to forage in, this would mean having to reduce the world’s population by something like 99.9 per cent. Otherwise, the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces; or, perhaps, to wangle a bit more wiggle room in which some of us can temporarily duck out of its way.

所有这些关于纯真和平等的原始状态的故事的最终效果，就像使用 “不平等” 一词本身一样，是使对人类状况的俏皮的悲观主义看起来像常识：通过历史的广阔镜头来看待我们的自然结果。是的，如果你是俾格米人或卡拉哈里布什曼人，生活在一个真正的平等主义社会可能是可能的。但是，如果你今天想创造一个真正平等的社会，你就必须想办法重新成为没有重要个人财产的小群觅食者。由于觅食者需要相当广泛的领土来觅食，这将意味着必须将世界人口减少大约 99.9%。否则，我们最好的希望就是调整将永远踩在我们脸上的靴子的大小；或者，也许是争取更多的回旋余地，使我们中的一些人能够暂时躲开它。

A first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all, and simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of social organization. Strangely enough, though, this is often seen as a reactionary move. ‘So are you saying true equality has never been achieved? That it’s therefore impossible?’ It seems to us that such objections are both counterproductive and frankly unrealistic.

要想对世界历史有一个更准确、更有希望的描述，第一步可能是一劳永逸地放弃 “伊甸园”，并简单地摒弃这样的观念：几十万年来，地球上的每个人都共享同样的田园诗般的社会组织形式。但奇怪的是，这常常被看作是一种反动的举动。“那么你是说真正的平等从来没有实现过？因此它是不可能的？” 在我们看来，这种反对意见既适得其反，又坦率地说是不现实的。

First of all, it’s bizarre to imagine that, say, during the roughly 10,000 (some would say more like 20,000) years in which people painted on the walls of Altamira, no one – not only in Altamira, but anywhere on earth – experimented with alternative forms of social organization. What’s the chance of that? Second of all, is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human? That is, beings with the capacity for self-creation, even freedom? The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together. Of course, to exercise that capacity implies that there should be something meaningful to decide in the first place.

首先，想象一下，比如说在人们在阿尔塔米拉的墙壁上作画的大约一万年（有些人会说更像是两万年）的时间里，没有人 —— 不仅在阿尔塔米拉，而且在地球上的任何地方 —— 尝试过其他形式的社会组织，这是非常奇怪的。这怎么可能呢？其次，实验不同形式的社会组织的能力本身不就是使我们成为人类的一个精髓部分吗？也就是说，具有自我创造能力，甚至自由的生命？正如我们将看到的，人类历史的最终问题不是我们平等地获得物质资源（土地、热量、生产资料），尽管这些东西显然很重要，而是我们在决定如何共同生活方面的平等能力。当然，要行使这种能力意味着首先应该有一些有意义的东西来决定。

If, as many are suggesting, our species’ future now hinges on our capacity to create something different (say, a system in which wealth cannot be freely transformed into power, or where some people are not told their needs are unimportant, or that their lives have no intrinsic worth), then what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place. As long ago as 1936, the prehistorian V. Gordon Childe wrote a book called Man Makes Himself . Apart from the sexist language, this is the spirit we wish to invoke. We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

如果像许多人建议的那样，我们这个物种的未来现在取决于我们创造不同东西的能力（例如，一个财富不能自由转化为权力的系统，或者一些人不会被告知他们的需求不重要，或者他们的生命没有内在价值），那么最终重要的是我们是否能重新发现使我们首先成为人类的自由。早在 1936 年，史前学家 V·戈登·奇尔德写了一本书，名为《人造就自己》。除了性别歧视的语言外，这就是我们希望援引的精神。我们是集体自我创造的项目。如果我们以这种方式对待人类历史呢？如果我们从一开始就把人当作富有想象力的、聪明的、好玩的、值得被理解的生物呢？如果我们不讲一个关于我们的物种如何从某种田园诗般的平等状态中堕落的故事，而是问我们如何被困在如此严格的概念桎梏中，以至于我们甚至无法再想象重塑自我的可能性，那会怎样？

SOME BRIEF EXAMPLES OF WHY RECEIVED UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE BROAD SWEEP OF HUMAN HISTORY ARE MOSTLY WRONG (OR, THE ETERNAL RETURN OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU)

一些简单的例子，说明为什么对人类历史的广泛理解大多是错误的（或者，雅克·卢梭的永恒回归）。

When we first embarked on this book, our intention was to seek new answers to questions about the origins of social inequality. It didn’t take long before we realized this simply wasn’t a very good approach. Framing human history in this way – which necessarily means assuming humanity once existed in an idyllic state, and that a specific point can be identified at which everything started to go wrong – made it almost impossible to ask any of the questions we felt were genuinely interesting. It felt like almost everyone else seemed to be caught in the same trap. Specialists were refusing to generalize. Those few willing to stick their necks out almost invariably reproduced some variation on Rousseau.

当我们第一次着手写这本书时，我们的意图是为有关社会不平等的起源问题寻求新的答案。没过多久，我们就意识到这根本不是一个很好的方法。以这种方式构建人类历史 —— 这必然意味着假设人类曾经存在于田园诗般的状态中，并且可以确定一个特定的点，在这个点上一切都开始出错 —— 使得我们几乎不可能提出任何我们认为真正有趣的问题。感觉上，几乎所有其他人都似乎陷入了同样的陷阱。专家们都拒绝归纳。那些愿意伸出脖子的少数人几乎无一例外地再现了卢梭的一些变种。

Let’s consider a fairly random example of one of these generalist accounts, Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2011). Here is Fukuyama on what he feels can be taken as received wisdom about early human societies: ‘In its early stages human political organization is similar to the band-level society observed in higher primates like chimpanzees,’ which Fukuyama suggests can be regarded as ‘a default form of social organization’. He then goes on to assert that Rousseau was largely correct in pointing out that the origin of political inequality lay in the development of agriculture, since hunter-gatherer societies (according to Fukuyama) have no concept of private property, and so little incentive to mark out a piece of land and say, ‘This is mine.’ Band-level societies of this sort, he suggests, are ‘highly egalitarian’.²

让我们考虑一个相当随意的例子，即弗朗西斯·福山的《政治秩序的起源：从前人类时代到法国大革命》（2011），是这些泛泛之谈中的一种。以下是福山对他认为可以被视为关于早期人类社会的公认智慧的看法。在其早期阶段，人类的政治组织类似于在黑猩猩等高等灵长类动物中观察到的族群（band-level society）社会，福山认为这可以被视为 “社会组织的默认形式”。他接着断言，卢梭指出政治不平等的起源在于农业的发展，这在很大程度上是正确的，因为狩猎·采集社会（根据福山的说法）没有私有财产的概念，所以很少有动力去标出一块土地并说：“这是我的”。他认为，这种群体性的社会是 “高度平等的”。²

Jared Diamond, in The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012) suggests that such bands (in which he believes humans still lived ‘as recently as 11,000 years ago’) comprised ‘just a few dozen individuals’, most biologically related. These small groups led a fairly meagre existence, ‘hunting and gathering whatever wild animal and plant species happen to live in an acre of forest’. And their social lives, according to Diamond, were enviably simple. Decisions were reached through ‘face-to-face discussion’; there were ‘few personal possessions’ and ‘no formal political leadership or strong economic specialization’.³ Diamond concludes that, sadly, it is only within such primordial groupings that humans ever achieved a significant degree of social equality.

贾里德·戴蒙德，在《直到昨天的世界：我们能从传统社会学到什么？》（2012）中指出，这样的族群（他认为人类 “在 11,000 年前” 仍然生活在其中）由 “几十个人” 组成，大多数都有生物学上的联系。这些小群体过着相当微薄的生活，“猎取和采集任何刚好生活在一英亩森林中的野生动物和植物物种”。据戴蒙德说，他们的社会生活简单得令人羡慕。决定是通过 “面对面的讨论” 达成的；“个人财产很少”，“没有正式的政治领导或强大的经济专业化”。³戴蒙德的结论是，可悲的是，只有在这样的原始群落中，人类才实现了相当程度的社会平等。

For Diamond and Fukuyama, as for Rousseau some centuries earlier, what put an end to that equality – everywhere and forever – was the invention of agriculture, and the higher population levels it sustained. Agriculture brought about a transition from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’. Accumulation of food surplus fed population growth, leading some ‘tribes’ to develop into ranked societies known as ‘chiefdoms’. Fukuyama paints an almost explicitly biblical picture of this process, a departure from Eden: ‘As little bands of human beings migrated and adapted to different environments, they began their exit out of the state of nature by developing new social institutions.’⁴ They fought wars over resources. Gangly and pubescent, these societies were clearly heading for trouble.

对于戴蒙德和福山来说，就像几个世纪前的卢梭一样，结束这种平等的是农业的发明，以及它所维持的更高的人口水平。农业带来了从 “族群” 到 “部落” 的过渡。粮食盈余的积累促进了人口增长，导致一些 “部落” 发展成被称为 “酋长国” 的等级社会。福山对这一过程描绘了一幅几乎明确的圣经画面，即离开伊甸园的过程：“随着人类的小群迁移并适应不同的环境，他们开始通过发展新的社会制度来退出自然状态。⁴他们为争夺资源而打仗。他们为争夺资源而发生战争，这些社会显然是在走向麻烦。

It was time to grow up and appoint some proper leadership. Hierarchies began to emerge. There was no point in resisting, since hierarchy – according to Diamond and Fukuyama – is inevitable once humans adopt large, complex forms of organization. Even when the new leaders began acting badly – creaming off agricultural surplus to promote their flunkies and relatives, making status permanent and hereditary, collecting trophy skulls and harems of slave-girls, or tearing out rivals’ hearts with obsidian knives – there could be no going back. Before long, chiefs had managed to convince others they should be referred to as ‘kings’, even ‘emperors’. As Diamond patiently explains to us:

是时候长大了，任命一些适当的领导。等级制度开始出现了。抵抗是没有意义的，因为根据戴蒙德和福山的观点，一旦人类采用大型复杂的组织形式，等级制度是不可避免的。即使新的领导人开始表现得很糟糕 —— 榨取农业盈余来提升他们的走狗和亲戚，使地位永久化和世袭化，收集战利品的头骨和女奴的后宫，或者用黑曜石刀挖出对手的心脏 —— 也无法回头了。 不久之后，酋长们已经设法说服其他人，他们应该被称为 “国王”，甚至是 “皇帝”。正如戴蒙德耐心地向我们解释的那样。

Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic: you’ll have to find some tiny band or tribe willing to accept you, where no one is a stranger, and where kings, presidents, and bureaucrats are unnecessary.⁵

如果没有做出决定的领导人，没有执行决定的行政人员，没有管理决定和法律的官僚，庞大的人口就无法运作。唉，对于你们这些无政府主义者和梦想在没有任何国家政府的情况下生活的读者来说，这些就是你们的梦想不现实的原因：你们必须找到一些愿意接受你们的小团体或部落，在那里没有人是陌生人，而国王、总统和官僚是不必要的。⁵

A dismal conclusion, not just for anarchists but for anybody who ever wondered if there might be a viable alternative to the current status quo. Still, the truly remarkable thing is that, despite the self-assured tone, such pronouncements are not actually based on any kind of scientific evidence. As we will soon be discovering, there is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian – or, conversely, that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents or even bureaucracies. Statements like these are just so many prejudices dressed up as facts, or even as laws of history.⁶

一个令人沮丧的结论，不仅对无政府主义者，而且对任何曾经想知道是否可能有一个可行的替代当前现状的人。然而，真正了不起的是，尽管语气自负，但这种声明实际上并没有任何科学证据。我们很快就会发现，根本没有理由相信小规模的群体特别可能是平等主义的 —— 或者反过来说，大的群体必须有国王、总统甚至官僚机构。像这样的声明只是许多偏见被装扮成事实，甚至是历史的规律。⁶

ON THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

关于追求幸福的问题

As we say, it’s all just an endless repetition of a story first told by Rousseau in 1754. Many contemporary scholars will quite literally say that Rousseau’s vision has been proved correct. If so, it is an extraordinary coincidence, since Rousseau himself never suggested that the innocent State of Nature really happened. On the contrary, he insisted he was engaging in a thought experiment: ‘One must not take the kind of research which we enter into as the pursuit of truths of history, but solely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better fitted to clarify the nature of things than to expose their actual origin…’⁷

正如我们所说，这一切只是卢梭在 1754 年首次讲述的故事的无尽重复。许多当代学者会很认真地说，卢梭的设想已经被证明是正确的。如果是这样，那就是一个非同寻常的巧合，因为卢梭本人从未暗示过无辜的自然状态真的发生过。相反，他坚持认为自己是在进行思想实验：“我们不能把我们所从事的那种研究看作是对历史真理的追求，而只能看作是假设性和条件性的推理，它更适合于澄清事物的本质，而不是揭露它们的实际来源……” ⁷

Rousseau’s portrayal of the State of Nature and how it was overturned by the coming of agriculture was never intended to form the basis for a series of evolutionary stages, like the ones Scottish philosophers such as Smith, Ferguson or Millar (and later on, Lewis Henry Morgan) were referring to when they spoke of ‘Savagery’ and ‘Barbarism’. In no sense was Rousseau imagining these different states of being as levels of social and moral development, corresponding to historical changes in modes of production: foraging, pastoralism, farming, industry. Rather, what Rousseau presented was more of a parable, by way of an attempt to explore a fundamental paradox of human politics: how is it that our innate drive for freedom somehow leads us, time and again, on a ‘spontaneous march to inequality’?⁸

卢梭对自然状态的描述以及它如何被农业的到来所颠覆，绝不是为了形成一系列进化阶段的基础，就像苏格兰哲学家如斯密、弗格森或米勒（以及后来的刘易斯·亨利· 摩根）在谈到 “野蛮”（Savagery）和 “未开化”（Barbarism）时所说的那样。在任何意义上，卢梭都没有把这些不同的存在状态想象成社会和道德发展的水平，与生产方式的历史变化相对应：觅食、放牧、耕种、工业。相反，卢梭提出的更像是一个寓言，试图探索人类政治的一个基本悖论：为什么我们与生俱来的自由动力会一次又一次地将我们引向 “自发的不平等”？⁸

Describing how the invention of farming first leads to private property, and property to the need for civil government to protect it, this is how Rousseau puts things: ‘All ran towards their chains, believing that they were securing their liberty; for although they had reason enough to discern the advantages of a civil order, they did not have experience enough to foresee the dangers.’⁹ His imaginary State of Nature was primarily invoked as a way of illustrating the point. True, he didn’t invent the concept: as a rhetorical device, the State of Nature had already been used in European philosophy for a century. Widely deployed by natural law theorists, it effectively allowed every thinker interested in the origins of government (Locke, Grotius and so on) to play God, each coming up with his own variant on humanity’s original condition, as a springboard for speculation.

卢梭在描述农业的发明如何首先导致私有财产，而财产又如何导致需要公民政府来保护它时，是这样说的：“所有人都奔向他们的锁链，认为他们在确保自己的自由；因为尽管他们有足够的理由来发现公民秩序的好处，但他们却没有足够的经验来预见危险性。”⁹他想象中的自然国主要是作为说明问题的一种方式而被引用的。的确，他没有发明这个概念：作为一种修辞手段，自然国在欧洲哲学中已经使用了一个世纪。它被自然法理论家广泛使用，有效地让每个对政府起源感兴趣的思想家（洛克、格劳秀斯等）扮演上帝，每个人都对人类的原始状况提出自己的变体，作为猜测的跳板。

Hobbes was doing much the same thing when he wrote in Leviathan that the primordial state of human society would necessarily have been a ‘Bellum omnium contra omnes ’, a war of all against all, which could only be overcome by the creation of an absolute sovereign power. He wasn’t saying there had actually been a time when everyone lived in such a primordial state. Some suspect that Hobbes’s state of war was really an allegory for his native England’s descent into civil war in the mid seventeenth century, which drove the royalist author into exile in Paris. Whatever the case, the closest Hobbes himself came to suggesting this state really existed was when he noted how the only people who weren’t under the ultimate authority of some king were the kings themselves, and they always seemed to be at war with one another.

当霍布斯在《利维坦》中写道，人类社会的原始状态必然是 “Bellum omnium contra omnes”，即所有人对所有人的战争，只有建立一个绝对的主权国家才能克服。他并不是说曾有过这样一个时代，每个人都生活在这样一个原始状态中。有些人怀疑霍布斯的战争状态实际上是对他的祖国英格兰在 17 世纪中期陷入内战的一种寓言，这使得这位保皇党作家流亡到巴黎。无论怎样，霍布斯本人最接近暗示这种状态真的存在的时候，他注意到唯一不在某个国王的最终权威之下的人是国王自己，而且他们似乎总是在互相争斗。

Despite all this, many modern writers treat Leviathan in the same way others treat Rousseau’s Discourse – as if it were laying the groundwork for an evolutionary study of history; and although the two have completely different starting points, the result is rather similar.¹⁰

尽管如此，许多现代作家对待《利维坦》的方式与其他人对待卢梭《不平等论》的方式相同 —— 仿佛它为历史的进化研究奠定了基础；尽管，两者的出发点完全不同，但结果却相当相似。¹⁰

‘When it came to violence in pre-state peoples,’ writes the psychologist Steven Pinker, ‘Hobbes and Rousseau were talking through their hats: neither knew a thing about life before civilization.’ On this point, Pinker is absolutely right. In the same breath, however, he also asks us to believe that Hobbes, writing in 1651 (apparently through his hat), somehow managed to guess right, and come up with an analysis of violence and its causes in human history that is ‘as good as any today’.¹¹ This would be an astonishing – not to mention damning – verdict on centuries of empirical research, if it only happened to be true. As we’ll see, it is not even close.¹²

心理学家史蒂芬·平克写道：“当谈到前国家民族的暴力时，“霍布斯和卢梭是在用他们的帽子说话（不懂装懂）：他们对文明之前的生活都一无所知。” 在这一点上，平克是完全正确的。然而，在同一时刻，他还要求我们相信，霍布斯在 1651 年写作时（显然是通过他的帽子），以某种方式设法猜对了，并对人类历史上的暴力及其原因进行了分析，“与今天的任何分析一个水平”。¹¹这将是对几个世纪以来实证研究的一个惊人的 —— 更不用说破坏性的 —— 裁决，如果它刚好是真的。正如我们将看到的那样，它甚至没有接近。¹²

We can take Pinker as our quintessential modern Hobbesian. In his magnum opus, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2012), and subsequent books like Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) he argues that today we live in a world which is, overall, far less violent and cruel than anything our ancestors had ever experienced.¹³

我们可以把平克当作我们典型的现代霍布斯主义者。在他的巨著《我们天性中更好的天使：为什么暴力会减少》（2012 年）中，以及随后的书籍，如《现在启蒙：理性、科学、人文主义和进步的理由》（2018 年）中，他认为今天我们生活的世界，总体上比我们的祖先所经历的任何事情都要少很多暴力和残酷。¹³

Now, this may seem counter-intuitive to anyone who spends much time watching the news, let alone who knows much about the history of the twentieth century. Pinker, though, is confident that an objective statistical analysis, shorn of sentiment, will show us to be living in an age of unprecedented peace and security. And this, he suggests, is the logical outcome of living in sovereign states, each with a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its borders, as opposed to the ‘anarchic societies’ (as he calls them) of our deep evolutionary past, where life for most people was, indeed, typically ‘nasty, brutish, and short’.

现在，对于任何花很多时间看新闻的人来说，这似乎是反直觉的，更不用说对二十世纪的历史有多少了解的人。不过，平克相信，剔除了情绪的客观统计分析将显示我们生活在一个前所未有的和平与安全的时代。他认为，这是生活在主权国家的逻辑结果，每个国家都垄断了在其境内合法使用暴力的权利，而不是我们进化史上的 “无政府社会”（如他所说），在那里，大多数人的生活确实是典型的 “肮脏、野蛮和短暂”。

Since, like Hobbes, Pinker is concerned with the origins of the state, his key point of transition is not the rise of farming but the emergence of cities. ‘Archaeologists’, he writes, ‘tell us that humans lived in a state of anarchy until the emergence of civilization some five thousand years ago, when sedentary farmers first coalesced into cities and states and developed the first governments.’¹⁴ What follows is, to put it bluntly, a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along. You might hope that a passionate advocate of science would approach the topic scientifically, through a broad appraisal of the evidence – but this is precisely the approach to human prehistory that Pinker seems to find uninteresting. Instead he relies on anecdotes, images and individual sensational discoveries, like the headline-making find, in 1991, of ‘Ötzi the Tyrolean Iceman’.

由于像霍布斯一样，平克关注的是国家的起源，他的关键过渡点不是农业的兴起，而是城市的出现。他写道，“考古学家” 告诉我们，人类一直生活在无政府状态中，直到大约五千年前文明的出现，那时定居的农民第一次凝聚成城市和国家，并发展出第一个政府。¹⁴接下来的内容，直截了当地说，是一个现代心理学家边做边说的。你可能希望一个热衷于科学的倡导者会通过对证据的广泛评估来科学地处理这个话题 —— 但，这正是平克似乎认为无趣的人类史前史的方法。相反，他依靠的是轶事、图像和个别轰动性的发现，比如 1991 年 “蒂罗尔冰人厄兹” 的头条发现。

‘What is it about the ancients,’ Pinker asks at one point, ‘that they couldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?’ There is an obvious response to this: doesn’t it rather depend on which corpse you consider interesting in the first place? Yes, a little over 5,000 years ago someone walking through the Alps left the world of the living with an arrow in his side; but there’s no particular reason to treat Ötzi as a poster child for humanity in its original condition, other than, perhaps, Ötzi suiting Pinker’s argument. But if all we’re doing is cherry-picking, we could just as easily have chosen the much earlier burial known to archaeologists as Romito 2 (after the Calabrian rock-shelter where it was found). Let’s take a moment to consider what it would mean if we did this.

平克有一次问道：“古人是怎么了，他们不能在不诉诸于犯规的情况下给我们留下一具有趣的尸体？” 对此有一个明显的回应：这难道不取决于你认为哪一具尸体首先是有趣的吗？是的，5000 多年前，有人在阿尔卑斯山上走过，身中一箭，离开了人世；但没有特别的理由把厄齐当作人类原始状态的海报，除了，也许，厄齐适合平克的论点之外。但是，如果我们所做的只是偷梁换柱，我们也可以很容易地选择更早的墓葬，考古学家称之为 “罗米托 2 号”（Romito 2，以发现它的卡拉布里亚岩棚为名）。让我们花点时间考虑一下如果我们这样做会意味着什么。

Romito 2 is the 10,000-year-old burial of a male with a rare genetic disorder (acromesomelic dysplasia): a severe type of dwarfism, which in life would have rendered him both anomalous in his community and unable to participate in the kind of high-altitude hunting that was necessary for their survival. Studies of his pathology show that, despite generally poor levels of health and nutrition, that same community of hunter-gatherers still took pains to support this individual through infancy and into early adulthood, granting him the same share of meat as everyone else, and ultimately according him a careful, sheltered burial.¹⁵

罗米托 2 号是一万年前的男性墓葬，他患有一种罕见的遗传性疾病（尖锐湿疣）：一种严重的侏儒症，这在生活中会使他在他的社区中变得不正常，无法参与那种高海拔的狩猎活动，而这正是他们生存的必要条件。对他的病理研究表明，尽管健康和营养水平普遍较差，但同一社区的狩猎采集者仍然不遗余力地支持这个人度过婴儿期并进入成年早期，给予他与其他人相同的肉类份额，并最终为他进行了精心的、有保护的埋葬。¹⁵

Neither is Romito 2 an isolated case. When archaeologists undertake balanced appraisals of hunter-gatherer burials from the Palaeolithic, they find high frequencies of health-related disabilities – but also surprisingly high levels of care until the time of death (and beyond, since some of these funerals were remarkably lavish).¹⁶ If we did want to reach a general conclusion about what form human societies originally took, based on statistical frequencies of health indicators from ancient burials, we would have to reach the exact opposite conclusion to Hobbes (and Pinker): in origin, it might be claimed, our species is a nurturing and care-giving species, and there was simply no need for life to be nasty, brutish or short.

罗米托 2 号也不是一个孤立的案例。当考古学家对旧石器时代的狩猎采集者墓葬进行平衡评估时，他们发现与健康有关的残疾频率很高 —— 但也有令人惊讶的高水平护理，直到死亡（甚至更久，因为其中一些葬礼是非常奢侈的）。¹⁶如果我们真的想根据古代墓葬中健康指标的统计频率得出关于人类社会最初采取什么形式的一般结论，我们将不得不得出与霍布斯（和平克）完全相反的结论：可以说，在起源上，我们的物种是一个养育和照顾的物种，根本没有必要让生命变得肮脏、野蛮或短暂。

We’re not suggesting we actually do this. As we’ll see, there is reason to believe that during the Palaeolithic, only rather unusual individuals were buried at all. We just want to point out how easy it would be to play the same game in the other direction – easy, but frankly not too enlightening.¹⁷ As we get to grips with the actual evidence, we always find that the realities of early human social life were far more complex, and a good deal more interesting, than any modern-day State of Nature theorist would ever be likely to guess.

我们并不建议我们真的这样做。正如我们将看到的，有理由相信在旧石器时代，只有相当不寻常的人被埋葬。我们只是想指出，从另一个方向玩同样的游戏是多么容易 —— 但坦率地说没有太多启发性。¹⁷随着我们对实际证据的掌握，我们总是发现，早期人类社会生活的现实要比任何现代自然状态理论家可能猜到的要复杂得多，也有趣得多。

When it comes to cherry-picking anthropological case studies, and putting them forward as representative of our ‘contemporary ancestors’ – that is, as models for what humans might have been like in a State of Nature – those working in the tradition of Rousseau tend to prefer African foragers like the Hadza, Pygmies or!Kung. Those who follow Hobbes prefer the Yanomami.

当谈到挑选人类学案例研究，并把它们作为我们 “当代祖先” 的代表 —— 也就是说，作为人类在自然状态下可能是什么样子的模型 —— 那些按照卢梭的传统工作的人往往更喜欢非洲的哈扎人、俾格米人或孔人等觅食者。那些追随霍布斯的人更喜欢雅诺马米人。

The Yanomami are an indigenous population who live largely by growing plantains and cassava in the Amazon rainforest, their traditional homeland, on the border of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil. Since the 1970s, the Yanomami have acquired a reputation as the quintessential violent savages: ‘fierce people’, as their most famous ethnographer, Napoleon Chagnon, called them. This seems decidedly unfair to the Yanomami since, in fact, statistics show they’re not particularly violent – compared with other Amerindian groups, Yanomami homicide rates turn out average-to-low.¹⁸ Again, though, actual statistics turn out to matter less than the availability of dramatic images and anecdotes. The real reason the Yanomami are so famous, and have such a colourful reputation, has everything to do with Chagnon himself: his 1968 book Yanomamö: The Fierce People, which sold millions of copies, and also a series of films, such as The Ax Fight, which offered viewers a vivid glimpse of tribal warfare. For a while all this made Chagnon the world’s most famous anthropologist, in the process turning the Yanomami into a notorious case study of primitive violence and establishing their scientific importance in the emerging field of sociobiology.

亚诺马米人是一个原住民，他们主要靠在亚马逊雨林中种植大蕉和木薯为生，亚马逊雨林是他们的传统家园，位于委内瑞拉南部和巴西北部的边界。自 20 世纪 70 年代以来，亚诺马米人已经获得了典型的暴力野蛮人的声誉。正如他们最著名的民族学家拿破仑·查尼翁所说，他们是 “凶猛的人”。这似乎对亚诺玛米人很不公平，因为事实上，统计数据显示他们并不特别暴力 —— 与其他美洲印第安人群体相比，亚诺玛米人的凶杀率一般到较低。¹⁸不过，实际的统计数字还是不如戏剧性的图像和轶事来得重要。亚诺玛米人之所以如此出名，并拥有如此丰富多彩的声誉，与查尼翁本人有很大关系：他在 1968 年出版的《亚诺玛默：凶猛的民族》一书售出了数百万册，还有一系列电影，如《斧头大战》，让观众生动地看到了部落战争。一时间，所有这些都使查尼翁成为世界上最著名的人类学家，在这个过程中，亚诺玛米人成为一个臭名昭著的原始暴力案例，并在新兴的社会生物学领域确立了他们的科学重要性。

We should be fair to Chagnon (not everyone is). He never claimed the Yanomami should be treated as living remnants of the Stone Age; indeed, he often noted that they obviously weren’t. At the same time, and somewhat unusually for an anthropologist, he tended to define them primarily in terms of things they lacked (e.g. written language, a police force, a formal judiciary), as opposed to the positive features of their culture, which has rather the same effect of setting them up as quintessential primitives.¹⁹ Chagnon’s central argument was that adult Yanomami men achieve both cultural and reproductive advantages by killing other adult men; and that this feedback between violence and biological fitness – if generally representative of the early human condition – might have had evolutionary consequences for our species as a whole.²⁰

我们应该对查尼翁公平一点（不是每个人都这样）。他从未声称亚诺玛米人应被视为石器时代的活体残余；事实上，他经常指出，他们显然不是。同时，对于一个人类学家来说不太常见，他倾向于主要从他们缺乏的东西（如书面语言、警察部队、正式的司法机构）来定义他们，而不是从他们文化的积极特征来定义他们，这反而会使他们被设定为典型的原始人。¹⁹查尼翁的中心论点是，雅诺马米族的成年男子通过杀害其他成年男子来实现文化和生殖优势；这种暴力和生物健康之间的反馈 —— 如果普遍代表早期人类的状况 —— 可能对我们整个物种的进化产生影响。²⁰

This is not just a big ‘if’ – it’s enormous. Other anthropologists started raining down questions, not always friendly.²¹ Allegations of professional misconduct were levelled at Chagnon (mostly revolving around ethical standards in the field), and everyone took sides. Some of these accusations appear baseless, but the rhetoric of Chagnon’s defenders grew so heated that (as another celebrated anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, put it) not only was he held up as the epitome of rigorous, scientific anthropology, but all who questioned him or his social Darwinism were excoriated as ‘Marxists’, ‘liars’, ‘cultural anthropologists from the academic left’, ‘ayatollahs’ and ‘politically correct bleeding hearts’. To this day, there is no easier way to get anthropologists to begin denouncing each other as extremists than to mention the name of Napoleon Chagnon.²²

这不仅仅是一个大的 “如果” —— 它是巨大的。其他人类学家开始雨后春笋般地提出问题，并不总是友好的。²¹对查尼翁的专业不当行为的指控（主要是围绕着该领域的道德标准），每个人都站在了一边。其中一些指控似乎毫无根据，但查尼翁的辩护人的言辞越来越激烈，以至于（正如另一位著名的人类学家克利福德·格尔茨所说）他不仅被捧为严谨、科学的人类学的缩影，而且所有质疑他或他的社会达尔文主义的人都被斥为 “马克思主义者”、“骗子”、“学术左派的文化人类学家”、“阿亚托拉” 和 “政治正确的吸血者”。时至今日，没有比提到拿破仑·查尼翁的名字更容易让人类学家开始互相指责为极端分子的了。²²

The important point here is that, as a ‘non-state’ people, the Yanomami are supposed to exemplify what Pinker calls the ‘Hobbesian trap’, whereby individuals in tribal societies find themselves caught in repetitive cycles of raiding and warfare, living fraught and precarious lives, always just a few steps away from violent death on the tip of a sharp weapon or at the end of a vengeful club. That, Pinker tells us, is the kind of dismal fate ordained for us by evolution. We have only escaped it by virtue of our willingness to place ourselves under the common protection of nation states, courts of law and police forces; and also by embracing virtues of reasoned debate and self-control that Pinker sees as the exclusive heritage of a European ‘civilizing process’, which produced the Age of Enlightenment (in other words, were it not for Voltaire, and the police, the knife-fight over Chagnon’s findings would have been physical, not just academic).

这里重要的一点是，作为一个 “非国家” 的民族，亚诺玛米人应该是平克所说的 “霍布斯陷阱” 的典范，即部落社会中的个人发现自己陷入了重复的突袭和战争的循环中，过着充满危险的生活，总是离暴力死亡只有几步之遥，就在锋利的武器尖端或复仇的棒子末端。平克告诉我们，这就是进化论为我们规定的那种可怕的命运。我们只是由于愿意将自己置于民族国家、法院和警察部队的共同保护之下而逃脱了这一命运；同时也由于接受了理性辩论和自我控制的美德，平克认为这是欧洲 “文明进程” 的独家遗产，它产生了启蒙时代（换句话说，如果没有伏尔泰和警察，为查尼翁的发现而进行的刀战将是肉体的，而不仅仅是学术的。）

There are many problems with this argument. We’ll start with the most obvious. The idea that our current ideals of freedom, equality and democracy are somehow products of the ‘Western tradition’ would in fact have come as an enormous surprise to someone like Voltaire. As we’ll soon see, the Enlightenment thinkers who propounded such ideals almost invariably put them in the mouths of foreigners, even ‘savages’ like the Yanomami. This is hardly surprising, since it’s almost impossible to find a single author in that Western tradition, from Plato to Marcus Aurelius to Erasmus, who did not make it clear that they would have been opposed to such ideas. The word ‘democracy’ might have been invented in Europe (barely, since Greece at the time was much closer culturally to North Africa and the Middle East than it was to, say, England), but it’s almost impossible to find a single European author before the nineteenth century who suggested it would be anything other than a terrible form of government.²³

这种说法有很多问题。我们从最明显的问题开始。我们目前的自由、平等和民主的理想是 “西方传统” 的产物，这种想法对于像伏尔泰这样的人来说，实际上是一个巨大的惊喜。我们很快就会看到，提出这些理想的启蒙思想家几乎总是把它们放在外国人的嘴里，甚至像雅诺马米人这样的 “野蛮人” 的嘴里。这并不奇怪，因为在西方传统中，从柏拉图到马库斯·奥勒留再到伊拉斯谟，几乎不可能找到一个没有明确表示他们会反对这种想法的作者。“民主” 这个词可能是在欧洲发明的（勉强说来，因为当时的希腊在文化上比英国更接近北非和中东），但几乎不可能找到一个在 19 世纪之前的欧洲作家认为它是一种可怕的政府形式之外的东西。²³

For obvious reasons, Hobbes’s position tends to be favoured by those on the right of the political spectrum, and Rousseau’s by those leaning left. Pinker positions himself as a rational centrist, condemning what he considers to be the extremists on either side. But why then insist that all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as ‘the white race’ (and now, generally, call themselves by its more accepted synonym, ‘Western civilization’)? There is simply no reason to make this move. It would be just as easy (actually, rather easier) to identify things that can be interpreted as the first stirrings of rationalism, legality, deliberative democracy and so forth all over the world, and only then tell the story of how they coalesced into the current global system.²⁴

由于显而易见的原因，霍布斯的立场往往受到政治光谱右派的青睐，而卢梭的立场则受到左派的青睐。平克将自己定位为一个理性的中间派，谴责他认为是两边的极端分子。但是，为什么又坚持认为二十世纪之前所有重要的人类进步形式都只能归功于那个曾经自称为 “白人”（现在一般都用更公认的同义词 “西方文明” 称呼自己）的人类群体？根本没有理由采取这种做法。确定那些可以被解释为全世界理性主义、法制、审议式民主等的最初萌芽的东西，然后再讲述它们如何凝聚成当前的全球体系，也同样容易（实际上相当容易）。²⁴

Insisting, to the contrary, that all good things come only from Europe ensures one’s work can be read as a retroactive apology for genocide, since (apparently, for Pinker) the enslavement, rape, mass murder and destruction of whole civilizations – visited on the rest of the world by European powers – is just another example of humans comporting themselves as they always had; it was in no sense unusual. What was really significant, so this argument goes, is that it made possible the dissemination of what he takes to be ‘purely’ European notions of freedom, equality before the law, and human rights to the survivors.

相反，坚持认为所有的好东西都只来自欧洲，可以确保自己的作品被解读为对种族灭绝的追溯性道歉，因为（显然，对平克来说）欧洲大国对整个文明的奴役、强奸、大规模谋杀和破坏，只是人类一如既往地自律的另一个例子；这在某种意义上并不罕见。这种说法认为，真正重要的是，它使他所认为的自由、法律面前人人平等和人权的 “纯” 欧洲概念得以传播给幸存者。

Whatever the unpleasantness of the past, Pinker assures us, there is every reason to be optimistic, indeed happy, about the overall path our species has taken. True, he does concede there is scope for some serious tinkering in areas like poverty reduction, income inequality or indeed peace and security; but on balance – and relative to the number of people living on earth today – what we have now is a spectacular improvement on anything our species accomplished in its history so far (unless you’re Black, or live in Syria, for example). Modern life is, for Pinker, in almost every way superior to what came before; and here he does produce elaborate statistics which purport to show how every day in every way – health, security, education, comfort, and by almost any other conceivable parameter – everything is actually getting better and better.

平克向我们保证，无论过去有什么不愉快，我们都有理由对我们人类所走的总体道路感到乐观，甚至是高兴。诚然，他承认，在减少贫困、收入不平等或者和平与安全等领域，还有一些认真修补的余地；但总的来说 —— 相对于今天生活在地球上的人数，我们现在所拥有的一切，比我们人类历史上迄今为止所完成的任何事情都有了惊人的进步（除非你是黑人，或者生活在叙利亚，比如说）。在平克看来，现代生活几乎在每一个方面都比以前的生活要好；在这里，他确实提供了详细的统计数据，旨在表明每天在每一个方面 —— 健康、安全、教育、舒适，以及几乎任何其他可以想象的参数 —— 一切实际上都在变得越来越好。

It’s hard to argue with the numbers, but as any statistician will tell you, statistics are only as good as the premises on which they are based. Has ‘Western civilization’ really made life better for everyone? This ultimately comes down to the question of how to measure human happiness, which is a notoriously difficult thing to do. About the only dependable way anyone has ever discovered to determine whether one way of living is really more satisfying, fulfilling, happy or otherwise preferable to any other is to allow people to fully experience both, give them a choice, then watch what they actually do. For instance, if Pinker is correct, then any sane person who had to choose between (a) the violent chaos and abject poverty of the ‘tribal’ stage in human development and (b) the relative security and prosperity of Western civilization would not hesitate to leap for safety.²⁵

对这些数字很难争辩，但正如任何统计学家会告诉你的那样，统计数字只有在它们所依据的前提下才是好的。西方文明 “真的让每个人的生活变得更好了吗？” 这最终归结为如何衡量人类幸福的问题，这是一个众所周知的困难的事情。人们所发现的确定一种生活方式是否真的比其他方式更令人满意、更充实、更快乐或更可取的唯一可靠方法是让人们充分体验这两种方式，给他们一个选择，然后观察他们实际做了什么。例如，如果平克是正确的，那么任何理智的人如果必须在（a）人类发展的 “部落” 阶段的暴力混乱和赤贫与（b）西方文明的相对安全和繁荣之间做出选择，都会毫不犹豫地跳到安全地带。²⁵

But empirical data is available here, and it suggests something is very wrong with Pinker’s conclusions.

但这里有经验数据，它表明平克的结论有很大问题。

Over the last several centuries, there have been numerous occasions when individuals found themselves in a position to make precisely this choice – and they almost never go the way Pinker would have predicted. Some have left us clear, rational explanations for why they made the choices they did. Let us consider the case of Helena Valero, a Brazilian woman born into a family of Spanish descent, whom Pinker mentions as a ‘white girl’ abducted by Yanomami in 1932 while travelling with her parents along the remote Rio Dimití.

在过去的几个世纪里，有无数次个人发现自己恰恰可以做出这样的选择 —— 而他们几乎从未按照平克预测的方式发展。有些人给我们留下了清晰、合理的解释，说明他们为什么做出这样的选择。让我们考虑一下海伦娜·瓦莱罗（Helena Valero）的案例，她是一个出生在西班牙家庭的巴西妇女，平克提到她是一个 “白人女孩”，在 1932 年与她的父母沿着遥远的迪米提河旅行时被亚诺马米人绑架了。

For two decades, Valero lived with a series of Yanomami families, marrying twice, and eventually achieving a position of some importance in her community. Pinker briefly cites the account Valero later gave of her own life, where she describes the brutality of a Yanomami raid.²⁶ What he neglects to mention is that in 1956 she abandoned the Yanomami to seek her natal family and live again in ‘Western civilization,’ only to find herself in a state of occasional hunger and constant dejection and loneliness. After a while, given the ability to make a fully informed decision, Helena Valero decided she preferred life among the Yanomami, and returned to live with them.²⁷

二十年来，瓦莱罗与一系列亚诺马米人家庭生活在一起，两次结婚，并最终在她的社区获得了一些重要的地位。平克简要地引用了瓦莱罗后来对自己生活的描述，她在那里描述了亚诺马米人突袭的残暴行为。²⁶他忽略了的是，1956 年，她放弃了亚诺马米人，去寻找她的娘家，重新生活在 “西方文明” 中，却发现自己处于一种偶尔的饥饿和持续的沮丧和孤独中。过了一段时间，在有能力做出充分知情决定的情况下，海伦娜·瓦莱罗决定她更喜欢亚诺马米人的生活，并回到他们身边生活。²⁷

Her story is by no means unusual. The colonial history of North and South America is full of accounts of settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies, being given the choice of where they wished to stay and almost invariably choosing to stay with the latter.²⁸ This even applied to abducted children. Confronted again with their biological parents, most would run back to their adoptive kin for protection.²⁹ By contrast, Amerindians incorporated into European society by adoption or marriage, including those who – unlike the unfortunate Helena Valero – enjoyed considerable wealth and schooling, almost invariably did just the opposite: either escaping at the earliest opportunity, or – having tried their best to adjust, and ultimately failed – returning to indigenous society to live out their last days.

她的故事绝非罕见。南北美洲的殖民历史充满了这样的描述：定居者被土著社会俘虏或收养后，可以选择他们希望留在哪里，但几乎无一例外地选择留在后者那里。²⁸这甚至适用于被绑架的儿童。当他们再次面对自己的亲生父母时，大多数人都会跑回收养他们的亲戚那里寻求保护。²⁹相比之下，通过收养或婚姻融入欧洲社会的美洲印第安人，包括那些 —— 与不幸的海伦娜·瓦莱罗不同 —— 享有大量财富和学校教育的人，几乎无一例外地采取了相反的做法：要么尽早逃离，要么 —— 在尽力适应但最终失败后 —— 回到土著社会，度过最后的日子。

Among the most eloquent commentaries on this whole phenomenon is to be found in a private letter written by Benjamin Franklin to a friend:

本杰明·富兰克林写给一位朋友的私人信件中，可以看到对这整个现象的最雄辩的评论。

When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was to be brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness.³⁰

当一个印第安人的孩子在我们中间长大，学会了我们的语言，习惯了我们的习俗，但如果他去看他的亲戚，和他们一起做一次印第安人的漫游，就无法劝说他再回来。并在他们中间生活了一段时间，尽管他们的朋友将其赎回，并以一切可以想象的温柔对待他们，说服他们留在英国人中间，但在很短的时间内，他们对我们的生活方式以及支持这种生活方式所需的照顾和痛苦感到厌恶，并利用第一个机会再次逃到森林中，从那里就无法再找到他们。我记得曾听说过这样一个例子：一个人被带回家，拥有一笔很好的财产；但他发现需要一些照顾它维持它，就把它交给了一个弟弟，只给自己保留了一把枪和一件火柴大衣，带着它又去了荒野。³⁰

Many who found themselves embroiled in such contests of civilization, if we may call them that, were able to offer clear reasons for their decisions to stay with their erstwhile captors. Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth.³¹ Others noted the ‘Indian’s’ reluctance ever to let anyone fall into a condition of poverty, hunger or destitution. It was not so much that they feared poverty themselves, but rather that they found life infinitely more pleasant in a society where no one else was in a position of abject misery (perhaps much as Oscar Wilde declared he was an advocate of socialism because he didn’t like having to look at poor people or listen to their stories). For anyone who has grown up in a city full of rough sleepers and panhandlers – and that is, unfortunately, most of us – it is always a bit startling to discover there’s nothing inevitable about any of this.

许多发现自己卷入这种文明竞赛的人，如果我们可以这么说的话，都能为他们决定留在以前的俘虏身边提供明确的理由。一些人强调了他们在美洲原住民社会中发现的自由的优点，包括性自由，但也有免于为追求土地和财富而不断劳作的期望的自由。³¹其他人则指出，“印第安人” 不愿意让任何人陷入贫穷、饥饿或贫困的境地。这并不是说他们自己害怕贫穷，而是他们发现在一个没有其他人处于赤贫地位的社会中，生活会无限地愉快（也许就像奥斯卡·王尔德宣称他是社会主义的倡导者，因为他不喜欢看穷人或听他们的故事）。对于任何在充满露宿者和乞丐的城市中长大的人 —— 不幸的是，这就是我们大多数人 —— 发现这一切没有什么不可避免的时候，总是有点惊愕。

Still others noted the ease with which outsiders, taken in by ‘Indian’ families, might achieve acceptance and prominent positions in their adoptive communities, becoming members of chiefly households, or even chiefs themselves.³² Western propagandists speak endlessly about equality of opportunity; these seem to have been societies where it actually existed. By far the most common reasons, however, had to do with the intensity of social bonds they experienced in Native American communities: qualities of mutual care, love and above all happiness, which they found impossible to replicate once back in European settings. ‘Security’ takes many forms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is.

还有一些人注意到，被 “印第安人” 家庭收留的外来者很容易在其收养的社区中获得认可和重要地位，成为酋长家庭的成员，甚至是酋长本人。³²西方的宣传家无休止地谈论机会平等；这些社会似乎确实存在着机会平等。然而，到目前为止，最常见的原因是他们在美洲原住民社区所经历的社会纽带的强度：相互关怀、爱，最重要的是幸福的品质，他们发现一旦回到欧洲环境中就不可能复制。“安全” 有多种形式。有一种安全感是知道自己在统计学上被箭射中的机会较小。还有一种安全感是知道如果一个人被射中，世界上会有一些人深深地关心他。

HOW THE CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVE OF HUMAN HISTORY IS NOT ONLY WRONG, BUT QUITE NEEDLESSLY DULL

人类历史的传统叙述不仅是错误的，而且是相当不必要的沉闷的

One gets the sense that indigenous life was, to put it very crudely, just a lot more interesting than life in a ‘Western’ town or city, especially insofar as the latter involved long hours of monotonous, repetitive, conceptually empty activity. The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imagination than on the life itself.

我们可以感觉到，土著人的生活，说得非常粗俗，就是比 “西方” 城镇或城市的生活有趣得多，尤其是后者涉及到长时间的单调、重复、概念上空洞的活动。我们发现很难想象这样一种替代性的生活是如何无休止地吸引人和有趣的，这一事实也许更多地反映了我们想象力的局限性，而不是生活本身。

One of the most pernicious aspects of standard world-historical narratives is precisely that they dry everything up, reduce people to cardboard stereotypes, simplify the issues (are we inherently selfish and violent, or innately kind and co-operative?) in ways that themselves undermine, possibly even destroy, our sense of human possibility. ‘Noble’ savages are, ultimately, just as boring as savage ones; more to the point, neither actually exist. Helena Valero was herself adamant on this point. The Yanomami were not devils, she insisted, neither were they angels. They were human, like the rest of us.

标准的世界历史叙事最有害的方面之一，正是它们把一切都弄得干巴巴的，把人简化成纸板上的刻板印象，把问题简化（我们是天生自私和暴力，还是天生善良和合作？最终，“高贵的” 野蛮人和野蛮人一样无聊；更重要的是，两者都不存在。海伦娜·瓦莱罗本人在这一点上很坚定。她坚持认为，亚诺马米人不是魔鬼，也不是天使。他们是人，和我们其他人一样。

Now, we should be clear here: social theory always, necessarily, involves a bit of simplification. For instance, almost any human action might be said to have a political aspect, an economic aspect, a psycho-sexual aspect and so forth. Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Claude Lévi-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

现在，我们应该清楚地认识到：社会理论总是必然涉及一些简化。例如，几乎任何人类行为都可以说是有政治方面、经济方面、性心理方面等等。社会理论在很大程度上是一种虚构的游戏，在这种游戏中，我们只是为了争论而假装只有一件事在发生：基本上，我们把一切都简化为卡通，以便能够检测出在其他方面看不见的模式。因此，社会科学的所有真正的进步都植根于敢于说出那些归根结底略显荒谬的东西：卡尔·马克思、西格蒙德·弗洛伊德或克劳德·列维·斯特劳斯的工作只是特别突出的例子。人们必须简化世界，才能发现其中的新东西。问题在于，在发现之后的很长一段时间里，人们还在继续简化。

Hobbes and Rousseau told their contemporaries things that were startling, profound and opened new doors of the imagination. Now their ideas are just tired common sense. There’s nothing in them that justifies the continued simplification of human affairs. If social scientists today continue to reduce past generations to simplistic, two-dimensional caricatures, it is not so much to show us anything original, but just because they feel that’s what social scientists are expected to do so as to appear ‘scientific’. The actual result is to impoverish history – and as a consequence, to impoverish our sense of possibility. Let us end this introduction with an illustration, before moving on to the heart of the matter.

霍布斯和卢梭告诉他们同时代的人的事情是惊人的、深刻的，并且打开了想象力的新大门。现在，他们的想法只是疲惫的常识。在他们的，没有任何东西可以证明人类事务的持续简化是合理的。如果今天的社会科学家继续把过去几代人简化成简单的、二维的漫画，这并不是为了向我们展示什么原创性，而只是因为他们觉得这是社会科学家应该做的，以便显得 “科学”。实际的结果是使历史变得贫乏 —— 因此也使我们的可能性意识变得贫乏。在进入问题的核心之前，让我们用一个例子来结束这个介绍。

Ever since Adam Smith, those trying to prove that contemporary forms of competitive market exchange are rooted in human nature have pointed to the existence of what they call ‘primitive trade’. Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence of objects – very often precious stones, shells or other items of adornment – being moved around over enormous distances. Often these were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would later find being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world. Surely this must prove capitalism in some form or another has always existed?

自亚当·斯密以来，那些试图证明当代竞争性市场交换形式植根于人类本性的人指出了他们所谓的 “原始贸易” 的存在。早在数万年前，人们就可以找到物品 —— 通常是宝石、贝壳或其他装饰品 —— 被远距离转移的证据。这些物品往往就是人类学家后来发现在世界各地作为 “原始货币” 使用的那种物品。当然，这必须证明以某种形式存在的资本主义一直存在？

The logic is perfectly circular. If precious objects were moving long distances, this is evidence of ‘trade’ and, if trade occurred, it must have taken some sort of commercial form; therefore, the fact that, say, 3,000 years ago Baltic amber found its way to the Mediterranean, or shells from the Gulf of Mexico were transported to Ohio, is proof that we are in the presence of some embryonic form of market economy. Markets are universal. Therefore, there must have been a market. Therefore, markets are universal. And so on.

这种逻辑是完全循环的。如果贵重物品被长途运输，这就是 “贸易” 的证据，如果贸易发生了，它一定采取了某种商业形式；因此，比如说 3000 年前波罗的海的琥珀被运到了地中海，或者墨西哥湾的贝壳被运到了俄亥俄州，这一事实证明我们处于某种市场经济的雏形中。市场是普遍存在的。因此，一定存在着市场。因此，市场是普遍的。以此类推。

All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument. It’s almost as if these writers are afraid to suggest anything that seems original, or, if they do, feel obliged to use vaguely scientific-sounding language (‘trans-regional interaction spheres’, ‘multi-scalar networks of exchange’) to avoid having to speculate about what precisely those things might be. In fact, anthropology provides endless illustrations of how valuable objects might travel long distances in the absence of anything that remotely resembles a market economy.

这类作者真正要说的是，他们自己无法想象贵重物品可能以任何其他方式移动。但缺乏想象力本身并不是一个论点。几乎可以说，这些作者不敢提出任何有创意的建议，或者，如果他们这样做了，他们觉得有必要使用听起来很模糊的科学语言（“跨区域互动圈”，“多尺度的交换网络”），以避免猜测这些东西到底是什么。事实上，人类学提供了无穷无尽的例子，说明在没有任何类似于市场经济的情况下，有价值的物品是如何长途跋涉的。

The founding text of twentieth-century ethnography, Bronisław Malinowski’s 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, describes how in the ‘kula chain’ of the Massim Islands off Papua New Guinea, men would undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas in outrigger canoes, just in order to exchange precious heirloom arm-shells and necklaces for each other (each of the most important ones has its own name, and history of former owners) – only to hold it briefly, then pass it on again to a different expedition from another island. Heirloom treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing hundreds of miles of ocean, arm-shells and necklaces in opposite directions. To an outsider, it seems senseless. To the men of the Massim it was the ultimate adventure, and nothing could be more important than to spread one’s name, in this fashion, to places one had never seen.

二十世纪民族学的奠基之作，布罗尼斯瓦夫（Bronisław） 马林诺夫斯基（Malinowski）在 1922 年的《西太平洋的阿戈纳特人》中描述了在巴布亚新几内亚附近的马西姆群岛的 “库拉链” 中，人们如何乘坐独木舟在危险的海面上进行大胆的探险。只是为了相互交换珍贵的传家宝臂壳和项链（每个最重要的臂壳和项链都有自己的名字，以及前主人的历史） —— 只是短暂地持有它，然后再把它传给来自另一个岛屿的不同探险队。传家宝永恒地围绕着岛链，穿越数百英里的海洋，臂壳和项链在相反的方向。对外人来说，这似乎毫无意义。对马西姆人来说，这是终极冒险，没有什么比以这种方式将自己的名字传播到从未见过的地方更重要了。

Is this ‘trade’? Perhaps, but it would bend to breaking point our ordinary understandings of what that word means. There is, in fact, a substantial ethnographic literature on how such long-distance exchange operates in societies without markets. Barter does occur: different groups may take on specialities – one is famous for its feather-work, another provides salt, in a third all women are potters – to acquire things they cannot produce themselves; sometimes one group will specialize in the very business of moving people and things around. But we often find such regional networks developing largely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having an excuse to visit one another from time to time;³³ and there are plenty of other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade’.

这是 “贸易” 吗？也许是，但它会使我们对这个词的含义的普通理解变得模糊不清。事实上，在没有市场的社会中，有大量的人种学文献论述了这种长距离的交换是如何运作的。以物易物的情况确实发生了：不同的群体可能会有自己的专长 —— 一个群体以其羽毛制品而闻名，另一个群体提供盐，在第三个群体中，所有的妇女都是陶工 —— 以获得他们自己无法生产的东西；有时一个群体会专门从事人员和物品的移动业务。但我们经常发现，这种区域网络的发展主要是为了建立友好的相互关系，或有借口不时地相互访问。³³还有很多与 “贸易” 毫不相干的其他可能性。

Let’s list just a few, all drawn from North American material, to give the reader a taste of what might really be going on when people speak of ‘long-distance interaction spheres’ in the human past:

让我们只列举几个，都是来自北美的材料，让读者尝尝当人们谈到人类过去的 “远距离互动领域” 时，可能真的发生了什么。

1. Dreams or vision quests : among Iroquoian-speaking peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was considered extremely important literally to realize one’s dreams. Many European observers marvelled at how Indians would be willing to travel for days to bring back some object, trophy, crystal or even an animal like a dog that they had dreamed of acquiring. Anyone who dreamed about a neighbour or relative’s possession (a kettle, ornament, mask and so on) could normally demand it; as a result, such objects would often gradually travel some way from town to town. On the Great Plains, decisions to travel long distances in search of rare or exotic items could form part of vision quests.³⁴

1.梦想或远景追求：在十六和十七世纪的伊鲁克语民族中，实现自己的梦想在字面上被认为是极其重要的。许多欧洲观察家惊叹于印第安人为了带回他们梦寐以求的一些物品、战利品、水晶甚至是狗等动物而不惜跋涉数日。任何人如果梦见邻居或亲戚的财物（水壶、装饰品、面具等），通常都可以要求得到它；因此，这类物品会，经常从一个镇子到另一个镇子逐渐走一段路。在大平原上，决定长途跋涉寻找稀有或奇特的物品，可能构成愿景追求的一部分。³⁴

2. Travelling healers and entertainers : in 1528, when a shipwrecked Spaniard named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca made his way from Florida across what is now Texas to Mexico, he found he could pass easily between villages (even villages at war with one another) by offering his services as a magician and curer. Curers in much of North America were also entertainers, and would often develop significant entourages; those who felt their lives had been saved by the performance would, typically, offer up all their material possessions to be divided among the troupe.³⁵ By such means, precious objects could easily travel very long distances.

2.旅行治疗师和艺人：1528 年，当一个名叫阿尔瓦·努涅斯·卡贝萨·德·瓦卡的西班牙人乘船从佛罗里达州穿过现在的德克萨斯州前往墨西哥时，他发现他可以通过提供魔术师和治疗师的服务，在村庄之间轻松通行（甚至是相互交战的村庄）。在北美的大部分地区，治疗师也是艺人，而且往往会形成重要的随行人员；那些认为自己的生命因表演而得到拯救的人，通常会献出他们所有的物质财富，由剧团分担。³⁵通过这种方式，珍贵的物品可以很容易地传到很远的地方。

3. Women’s gambling : women in many indigenous North American societies were inveterate gamblers; the women of adjacent villages would often meet to play dice or a game played with a bowl and plum stone, and would typically bet their shell beads or other objects of personal adornment as the stakes. One archaeologist versed in the ethnographic literature, Warren DeBoer, estimates that many of the shells and other exotica discovered in sites halfway across the continent had got there by being endlessly wagered, and lost, in inter-village games of this sort, over very long periods of time.³⁶

3.妇女的赌博：许多北美原住民社会的妇女都是不折不扣的赌徒；相邻村庄的妇女经常聚会，玩骰子或用碗和梅花石玩的游戏，通常会用她们的贝壳珠子或其他个人装饰品作为赌注。一位精通人种学文献的考古学家沃伦·德波尔估计，在半个大陆的遗址中发现的许多贝壳和其他异物都是在这种村落间的游戏中无休止地下注和输掉的，而且时间很长。³⁶

We could multiply examples, but assume that by now the reader gets the broader point we are making. When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky – in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.

我们可以举出更多的例子，但假设读者现在已经明白了我们所要表达的更广泛的观点。当我们简单地猜测其他时间和地点的人类可能在做什么时，我们几乎无一例外地做出了不那么有趣、不那么古怪的猜测 —— 总之，比起可能发生的事情，人类的猜测要少得多。

ON WHAT’S TO FOLLOW

关于接下来的内容

In this book we will not only be presenting a new history of humankind, but inviting the reader into a new science of history, one that restores our ancestors to their full humanity. Rather than asking how we ended up unequal, we will start by asking how it was that ‘inequality’ became such an issue to begin with, then gradually build up an alternative narrative that corresponds more closely to our current state of knowledge. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what did they imply? What was really happening in those periods we usually see as marking the emergence of ‘the state’? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

在这本书中，我们不仅要展示一部新的人类历史，而且要邀请读者进入一门新的历史科学，使我们的祖先恢复其全部人性。我们不问，而是先问 “不平等” 是如何开始成为这样一个问题的，然后逐步建立起一个更符合我们目前知识状况的替代性叙述。如果人类在进化过程中的 95% 的时间不是在小规模的狩猎采集者中度过的，那么他们一直在做什么？如果农业和城市并不意味着陷入等级制度和统治，那么它们意味着什么？在那些我们通常认为标志着 “国家” 出现的时期，到底发生了什么？答案往往是出乎意料的，并表明人类历史的进程可能不那么一成不变，而比我们倾向于假设的更充满了游戏的可能性。

In one sense, then, this book is simply trying to lay down foundations for a new world history, rather as Gordon Childe did when, back in the 1930s, he invented phrases like ‘the Neolithic Revolution’ or ‘the Urban Revolution’. As such it is necessarily uneven and incomplete. At the same time, this book is also something else: a quest to discover the right questions. If ‘what is the origin of inequality?’ is not the biggest question we should be asking about history, what then should it be? As the stories of one-time captives escaping back to the woods again make clear, Rousseau was not entirely mistaken. Something has been lost. He just had a rather idiosyncratic (and ultimately, false) notion of what it was. How do we characterize it, then? And how lost is it really? What does it imply about possibilities for social change today?

因此，从某种意义上说，这本书只是试图为新的世界历史打下基础，就像戈登·奇尔德在 1930 年代发明 “新石器时代革命” 或 “城市革命” 这样的短语一样。因此，它必然是不平衡和不完整的。同时，这本书也是别的东西：对发现正确问题的探索。如果 “不平等的起源是什么？” 不是我们应该对历史提出的最大问题，那么应该是什么？正如那些曾经的俘虏再次逃回森林的故事所表明的那样，卢梭并不是完全错误的。有些东西已经失去了。他只是对它是什么有一个相当特异的（而且最终是错误的）概念。那么，我们该如何描述它呢？它到底失去了多少？它对今天社会变革的可能性意味着什么？

For about a decade now, we – that is, the two authors of this book – have been engaged in a prolonged conversation with each other about exactly these questions. This is the reason for the book’s somewhat unusual structure, which begins by tracing the historical roots of the question (‘what is the origin of social inequality?’) back to a series of encounters between European colonists and Native American intellectuals in the seventeenth century. The impact of those encounters upon what we now term the Enlightenment, and indeed our basic conceptions of human history, is both more subtle and profound than we usually care to admit. Revisiting them, as we discovered, has startling implications for how we make sense of the human past today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself. In the end, we decided to write a book that would echo, to some degree at least, that evolution in our own thought. In those conversations, the real breakthrough moment came when we decided to move away from European thinkers like Rousseau entirely, and instead consider perspectives that derive from those indigenous thinkers who ultimately inspired them.

大约十年来，我们 —— 也就是本书的两位作者 —— 一直在就这些问题彼此进行长时间的对话。这就是本书的结构有些不寻常的原因，它从追溯问题的历史根源（“社会不平等的起源是什么？”）开始，追溯到 17 世纪欧洲殖民者和美洲本土知识分子之间的一系列遭遇。这些接触对我们现在所称的启蒙运动，乃至我们对人类历史的基本概念的影响，比我们通常愿意承认的更加微妙和深刻。正如我们发现的那样，重新审视它们对我们今天如何理解人类的过去，包括农业、财产、城市、民主、奴隶制和文明本身的起源，有着惊人的影响。最后，我们决定写一本书，至少在某种程度上响应我们自己思想的演变。在这些对话中，真正的突破时刻出现了，我们决定完全远离像卢梭这样的欧洲思想家，转而考虑源自那些最终启发他们的本土思想家的观点。

So let us begin right there.

IN WHICH WE SHOW HOW CRITIQUES OF EUROCENTRISM CAN BACKFIRE, AND END UP TURNING ABORIGINAL THINKERS INTO ‘SOCK-PUPPETS’

其中，我们展示了对欧洲中心主义的批评如何适得其反，并最终将原住民思想家变成了 “袜子木偶”

In March 1754, the learned society known as the Académie des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Dijon announced a national essay competition on the question: ‘what is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?’ What we’d like to do in this chapter is ask: why is it that a group of scholars in Ancien Régime France, hosting a national essay contest, would have felt this was an appropriate question in the first place? The way the question is put, after all, assumes that social inequality did have an origin; that is, it takes for granted that there was a time when human beings were equals – and that something then happened to change this situation.

1754 年 3 月，被称为第戎科学、艺术和文学学院的学术团体宣布了一项关于以下问题的全国性征文比赛：“人与人之间不平等的起源是什么，它是否得到了自然法的授权？” 在这一章中，我们想问的是：为什么古法国的一群学者在举办全国征文比赛时，首先会觉得这是一个合适的问题？毕竟，提出这个问题的方式是假设社会不平等确实有一个起源；也就是说，它想当然地认为曾经有一个人类平等的时代 —— 然后发生了一些事情来改变这种状况。

That is actually quite a startling thing for people living under an absolutist monarchy like that of Louis XV to think. After all, it’s not as if anyone in France at that time had much personal experience of living in a society of equals. This was a culture in which almost every aspect of human interaction – whether eating, drinking, working or socializing – was marked by elaborate pecking orders and rituals of social deference. The authors who submitted their essays to this competition were men who spent their lives having all their needs attended to by servants. They lived off the patronage of dukes and archbishops, and rarely entered a building without knowing the precise order of importance of everyone inside. Rousseau was one such man: an ambitious young philosopher, he was at the time engaged in an elaborate project of trying to sleep his way into influence at court. The closest he’d likely ever come to experiencing social equality himself was someone doling out equal slices of cake at a dinner party. Yet everyone at the time also agreed that this situation was somehow unnatural; that it had not always been that way.

对于生活在像路易十五那样的绝对主义君主制下的人们来说，这实际上是一件很令人吃惊的事情。毕竟，在当时的法国，好像没有人对生活在一个平等的社会里有什么个人经验。在这种文化中，人类互动的几乎每一个方面 —— 无论是吃、喝、工作还是社交 —— 都以精心设计的啄食秩序和社会敬畏仪式为标志。向这次比赛提交论文的作者都是一辈子由仆人满足其所有需求的人。他们靠公爵和大主教的赞助过活，很少在不知道里面每个人的确切重要性的情况下进入一个建筑物。卢梭就是这样一个人：一个雄心勃勃的年轻哲学家，当时他正从事一项精心策划的计划，试图通过睡觉的方式在宫廷中获得影响力。他自己最接近体验社会平等的地方可能是有人在晚宴上分发平等的蛋糕片。然而，当时每个人都同意，这种情况在某种程度上是不自然的；它并不总是这样的。

If we want to understand why that was, we need to look not only at France, but also at France’s place in a much larger world.

如果我们想了解为什么会这样，那么，我们不仅要看法国，还要看法国在一个更大的世界中的地位。

Fascination with the question of social inequality was relatively new in the 1700s, and it had everything to do with the shock and confusion that followed Europe’s sudden integration into a global economy, where it had long been a very minor player.

对社会不平等问题的迷恋在 17 世纪相对较新，它与欧洲突然融入全球经济后的震惊和混乱，在那里它长期以来一直是一个非常小的角色。

In the Middle Ages, most people in other parts of the world who actually knew anything about northern Europe at all considered it an obscure and uninviting backwater full of religious fanatics who, aside from occasional attacks on their neighbours (‘the Crusades’), were largely irrelevant to global trade and world politics.¹ European intellectuals of that time were just rediscovering Aristotle and the ancient world, and had very little idea what people were thinking and arguing about anywhere else. All this changed, of course, in the late fifteenth century, when Portuguese fleets began rounding Africa and bursting into the Indian Ocean – and especially with the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Suddenly, a few of the more powerful European kingdoms found themselves in control of vast stretches of the globe, and European intellectuals found themselves exposed, not only to the civilizations of China and India but to a whole plethora of previously unimagined social, scientific and political ideas. The ultimate result of this flood of new ideas came to be known as the ‘Enlightenment’.

在中世纪，世界上其他地方的大多数人，如果对北欧有任何了解，都认为它是一个晦涩难懂的落后地区，到处都是宗教狂热者，除了偶尔对邻国发动攻击（“十字军东征”）外，对全球贸易和世界政治基本没有影响。¹当时的欧洲知识分子刚刚重新发现亚里士多德和古代世界，对其他地方的人们在思考和争论什么知之甚少。当然，这一切在 15 世纪末发生了变化，葡萄牙舰队开始绕过非洲，冲进印度洋 —— 特别是随着西班牙对美洲的征服。突然间，几个更强大的欧洲王国发现自己控制了全球的大片土地，欧洲知识分子发现自己不仅接触到了中国和印度的文明，还接触到了大量以前无法想象的社会、科学和政治思想。这场新思想洪流的最终结果被称为 “启蒙运动”。

Of course, this isn’t usually the way historians of ideas tell this story. Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great thoughts, but these ‘great thinkers’ are assumed to perform both these activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.²

当然，这通常不是思想史家讲述这个故事的方式。我们不仅被教导要把思想史看作是主要由个人写伟大的书或思考伟大的思想而产生的东西，而且这些 “伟大的思想家” 被认为是在几乎完全参照对方的情况下进行这两种活动。因此，即使在启蒙思想家公开坚持他们的思想来自外国的情况下（就像德国哲学家戈特弗里德·威廉·莱布尼茨在敦促他的同胞采用中国的国家管理模式时那样），当代历史学家也倾向于坚持他们并不是真的。否则，当他们说他们在接受中国、波斯或美洲本土的思想时，这些思想根本就不是真正的中国、波斯或美洲本土的思想，而是他们自己编造出来的，只是归因于异国他乡。²

These are remarkably arrogant assumptions – as if ‘Western thought’ (as it later came to be known) was such a powerful and monolithic body of ideas that no one else could possibly have any meaningful influence on it. It’s also pretty obviously untrue. Just consider the case of Leibniz: over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European governments gradually came to adopt the idea that every government should properly preside over a population of largely uniform language and culture, run by a bureaucratic officialdom trained in the liberal arts whose members had succeeded in passing competitive exams. It might seem surprising that they did so, since nothing remotely like that had existed in any previous period of European history. Yet it was almost exactly the system that had existed for centuries in China.

这些都是非常傲慢的假设 —— 仿佛 “西方思想”（后来被称为 “西方思想”）是如此强大和单一的思想体系，以至于没有人可能对它产生任何有意义的影响。这显然也是不真实的。只要考虑一下莱布尼茨的情况：在十八和十九世纪的过程中，欧洲政府逐渐采纳了这样的想法：每个政府都应该适当地主持一个语言和文化基本统一的人口，由一个受过文科训练的官场管理，其成员都成功通过了竞争性考试。他们这样做似乎令人惊讶，因为在欧洲历史上的任何时期都不曾有过这样的情况。然而，这几乎完全是在中国已经存在了几个世纪的制度。

Are we really to insist that the advocacy of Chinese models of statecraft by Leibniz, his allies and followers really had nothing to do with the fact that Europeans did, in fact, adopt something that looks very much like Chinese models of statecraft? What is really unusual about this case is that Leibniz was so honest about his intellectual influences. When he lived, Church authorities still wielded a great deal of power in most of Europe: anyone making an argument that non-Christian ways were in any way superior might find themselves facing charges of atheism, which was potentially a capital offence.³

难道我们真的要坚持认为，莱布尼茨、他的盟友和追随者对中国治国模式的倡导，与欧洲人事实上确实采用了很像中国治国模式的东西无关？这个案例真正不寻常的地方在于，莱布尼茨对他的思想影响是如此诚实。在他生活的年代，教会当局在欧洲大部分地区仍然掌握着很大的权力：任何提出非基督教方式有任何优越性的论点的人都可能发现自己面临无神论的指控，而这有可能是一种死刑。³

It is much the same with the question of inequality. If we ask, not ‘what are the origins of social inequality?’ but ‘what are the origins of the question about the origins of social inequality?’ (in other words, how did it come about that, in 1754, the Académie de Dijon would think this an appropriate question to ask?), then we are immediately confronted with a long history of Europeans arguing with one another about the nature of faraway societies: in this case, particularly in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. What’s more, a lot of those conversations make reference to arguments that took place between Europeans and indigenous Americans about the nature of freedom, equality or for that matter rationality and revealed religion – indeed, most of the themes that would later become central to Enlightenment political thought.

不平等的问题也是如此。如果我们问，不是 “社会不平等的起源是什么？” 而是 “关于社会不平等的起源问题的起源是什么？”（换句话说，在 1754 年，第戎学院会认为这是一个合适的问题，这是怎么来的？），那么我们就会立即面对欧洲人互相争论遥远社会的性质的漫长历史：在这种情况下，特别是在北美东部林地。更重要的是，这些对话中很多都提到了欧洲人和美洲原住民之间关于自由、平等或理性和启示宗教的性质的争论 —— 事实上，大多数主题后来都成为启蒙运动政治思想的核心。

Many influential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim that some of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from Native American sources – even though, predictably, intellectual historians today insist this cannot really be the case. Indigenous people are assumed to have lived in a completely different universe, inhabited a different reality, even; anything Europeans said about them was simply a shadow-play projection, fantasies of the ‘noble savage’ culled from the European tradition itself.⁴

许多有影响力的启蒙思想家事实上声称，他们在这个问题上的一些想法直接来自美洲原住民 —— 尽管可以预见的是，今天的知识分子历史学家坚持认为这不可能是真的。土著人被认为生活在一个完全不同的宇宙中，甚至居住在一个不同的现实中；欧洲人关于他们的任何说法都只是一个影子游戏的投影，是从欧洲传统中摘取的 “高贵的野蛮人” 的幻想。⁴

Of course, such historians typically frame this position as a critique of Western arrogance (‘how can you suggest that genocidal imperialists were actually listening to those whose societies they were in the process of stamping out?’), but it could equally well be seen as a form of Western arrogance in its own right. There is no contesting that European traders, missionaries and settlers did actually engage in prolonged conversations with people they encountered in what they called the New World, and often lived among them for extended periods of time – even as they also colluded in their destruction. We also know that many of those living in Europe who came to embrace principles of freedom and equality (principles barely existing in their countries a few generations before) claimed that accounts of these encounters had a profound influence on their thinking. To deny any possibility that they were right is, effectively, to insist that indigenous people could not possibly have any real impact on history. It is, in fact, a way of infantilizing non-Westerners: a practice denounced by these very same authors.

当然，这类历史学家通常将这一立场设定为对西方傲慢的批判（“你怎么能说种族灭绝的帝国主义者实际上在倾听那些他们正在铲除的社会的声音呢？”），但这同样可以被视为西方傲慢本身的一种形式。毋庸置疑，欧洲商人、传教士和定居者确实与他们在所谓的新世界遇到的人进行了长时间的对话，并经常长期生活在他们中间 —— 即使他们也在串通破坏他们。我们还知道，许多生活在欧洲的人开始接受自由和平等的原则（这些原则在他们国家几代人之前几乎不存在），他们声称这些遭遇的描述对他们的思想产生了深刻的影响。否认他们是正确的任何可能性，实际上就是坚持认为土著人不可能对历史产生任何真正的影响。事实上，这是一种对非西方人进行幼稚化的方式：这也是这些作者所谴责的做法。

In recent years, a growing number of American scholars, most themselves of indigenous descent, have challenged these assumptions.⁵ Here we follow in their footsteps. Basically, we are going to retell the story, starting from the assumption that all parties to the conversation between European colonists and their indigenous interlocutors were adults, and that, at least occasionally, they actually listened to each other. If we do this, even familiar histories suddenly begin to look very different. In fact, what we’ll see is not only that indigenous Americans – confronted with strange foreigners – gradually developed their own, surprisingly consistent critique of European institutions, but that these critiques came to be taken very seriously in Europe itself.

近年来，越来越多的美洲学者，其中大多数人本身是原住民后裔，对这些假设提出了挑战。⁵在这里，我们追随他们的脚步。基本上，我们将重新讲述这个故事，从以下假设开始：欧洲殖民者和他们的原住民对话者之间的所有各方都是成年人，而且，至少偶尔，他们确实听了对方的话。如果我们这样做，即使是熟悉的历史也会突然开始变得非常不同。事实上，我们将看到的不仅是美洲原住民 —— 面对陌生的外国人 —— 逐渐发展出他们自己的、令人惊讶的对欧洲机构的一致批判，而且这些批判在欧洲本身也被非常认真地对待。

Just how seriously can hardly be overstated. For European audiences, the indigenous critique would come as a shock to the system, revealing possibilities for human emancipation that, once disclosed, could hardly be ignored. Indeed, the ideas expressed in that critique came to be perceived as such a menace to the fabric of European society that an entire body of theory was called into being, specifically to refute them. As we will shortly see, the whole story we summarized in the last chapter – our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

至于有多严重，怎么强调都不为过。对于欧洲观众来说，本土批判是对系统的冲击，它揭示了人类解放的可能性，一旦披露，就很难被忽视。事实上，这种批判所表达的思想被认为是对欧洲社会结构的威胁，以至于整个理论体系被召唤出来，专门用来驳斥它们。我们很快就会看到，我们在上一章中总结的整个故事 —— 我们关于人类文明的矛盾进展的标准历史元叙事，即随着，社会越来越大，越来越复杂，自由就会丧失 —— 主要是为了消除本土批判的威胁而发明的。

The first thing to emphasize is that ‘the origin of social inequality’ is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. Even in the Garden of Eden, as the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas observed, Adam clearly outranked Eve. ‘Social equality’ – and therefore, its opposite, inequality – simply did not exist as a concept. A recent survey of medieval literature by two Italian scholars in fact finds no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus. So one cannot even say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social equality: the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them.⁶

首先要强调的是，“社会不平等的起源” 对中世纪的任何人来说都不是一个有意义的问题。阶级和等级制度被认为从一开始就已经存在了。甚至在伊甸园里，正如 13 世纪的哲学家托马斯·阿奎那（Thomas Aquinas）所观察到的，亚当的地位明显高于夏娃。“社会平等” —— 由此，它的反面 —— “不平等” —— 作为一个概念根本不存在。两位意大利学者最近对中世纪文献的调查实际上没有发现任何证据表明，在哥伦布时代之前，拉丁语的 aequalitas 或 inaequalitas 或其英语、法语、西班牙语、德语和意大利语的同义词根本就被用来描述社会关系。因此，我们甚至不能说中世纪的思想家们拒绝了社会平等的概念：他们似乎从来没有想过可能存在的想法。⁶

In fact, the terms ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe’s discoveries in the New World.

事实上，“平等” 和 “不平等” 这两个词是在 17 世纪初，在自然法理论的影响下才开始进入人们的视野。而自然法理论又主要是在关于欧洲在新世界的发现所带来的道德和法律影响的辩论过程中产生的。

It’s important to remember that Spanish adventurers like Cortés and Pizarro carried out their conquests largely without authorization from higher authorities; afterwards, there were intense debates back home over whether such unvarnished aggression against people who, after all, posed no threat to Europeans could really be justified.⁷ The key problem was that – unlike non-Christians of the Old World, who could be assumed to have had the opportunity to learn the teachings of Jesus, and therefore to have actively rejected them – it was fairly obvious that the inhabitants of the New World simply never had any exposure to Christian ideas. So they couldn’t be classed as infidels.

重要的是要记住，像科尔特斯和皮萨罗这样的西班牙冒险家在很大程度上是在没有上级授权的情况下进行征服的；事后，国内对这种对毕竟对欧洲人不构成威胁的人进行不加掩饰的侵略是否真的合理进行了激烈的辩论。⁷关键问题在于 —— 与旧世界的非基督徒不同，可以认为他们有机会学习耶稣的教义，因此会主动拒绝这些教义 —— 相当明显，新世界的居民根本没有接触过基督教思想。所以他们不能被归类为异教徒。

The conquistadors generally finessed this question by reading a declaration in Latin calling on all the Indians to convert before attacking them. Legal scholars in universities like Salamanca in Spain were not impressed by this expedient. At the same time, attempts to write off the inhabitants of the Americas as so utterly alien that they fell outside the bounds of humanity entirely, and could be treated literally like animals, also didn’t find much purchase. Even cannibals, the jurists noted, had governments, societies and laws, and were able to construct arguments to defend the justice of their (cannibalistic) social arrangements; therefore they were clearly humans, vested by God with powers of reason.

征服者们通常通过宣读拉丁文宣言来解决这个问题，呼吁所有印第安人在攻击他们之前改变信仰。西班牙萨拉曼卡等大学的法律学者对这种权宜之计不以为然。同时，试图把美洲居民写成完全陌生的人，以至于他们完全不属于人类的范围，可以像动物一样被对待，也没有找到多少人买账。法学家们指出，即使是食人族，也有政府、社会和法律，并且能够构建论据来捍卫他们（食人族）社会安排的正义性；因此他们显然是人类，被上帝赋予了理性的力量。

The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human – that is, what rights could they be said to have ‘naturally’, even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion, and without codified laws? The matter was hotly debated. We need not linger here on the exact formulae that natural law theorists came up with (suffice to say, they did allow that Americans had natural rights, but ended up justifying their conquest anyway, provided their subsequent treatment was not too violent or oppressive), but what is important, in this context, is that they opened a conceptual door. Writers like Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius or John Locke could skip past the biblical narratives everyone used to start with, and begin instead with a question such as: what might humans have been like in a State of Nature, when all they had was their humanity?

于是，法律和哲学问题变成了：人类仅仅因为是人而拥有什么权利 —— 也就是说，即使他们存在于自然状态中，没有书面哲学和启示宗教的教义，也没有成文的法律，他们可以说是 “自然” 拥有什么权利？这个问题引起了激烈的争论。我们没有必要在此纠缠于自然法理论家提出的确切公式（只需说，他们确实允许美洲人拥有自然权利，但最终还是为他们的征服行为辩护，只要他们随后的待遇不是太暴力或压迫），但重要的是，在这种情况下，他们打开了一扇概念性的大门。像托马斯·霍布斯、雨果·格劳秀斯或约翰·洛克这样的作家可以跳过每个人都用来开始的圣经叙述，而从一个问题开始，例如：当人类拥有的只是他们的人性时，在自然状态下可能是什么样子？

Each of these authors populated the State of Nature with what they took to be the simplest societies known in the Western Hemisphere, and thus they concluded that the original state of humanity was one of freedom and equality, for better or worse (Hobbes, for example, definitely felt it was worse). It’s important to stop here for a moment and consider why they came to this verdict – because it was by no means an obvious or inevitable conclusion.

这些作者中的每一位都用他们认为是西半球已知的最简单的社会来填充自然状态，因此他们得出结论，人类的原始状态是自由和平等的，无论好坏（例如，霍布斯肯定认为它更糟糕）。重要的是，在此停一停，考虑一下他们为什么会得出这个结论 —— 因为这绝不是一个明显或不可避免的结论。

First of all, while it may seem obvious to us, the fact that natural law theorists in the seventeenth century fixed on apparently simple societies as exemplars of primordial times – societies like the Algonkians of North America’s Eastern Woodlands, or the Caribs and Amazonians, rather than urban civilizations like the Aztecs or Inca – would not have seemed obvious at the time.

首先，虽然在我们看来很明显，但十七世纪的自然法理论家将明显简单的社会固定为原始时代的典范 —— 像北美东部林地的阿尔贡人或加勒比人和亚马逊人这样的社会，而不是像阿兹特克人或印加人这样的城市文明 —— 在当时似乎并不明显。

Earlier authors, confronted by a population of forest dwellers with no king and employing only stone tools, were unlikely to have seen them as in any way primordial. Sixteenth-century scholars, such as the Spanish missionary José de Acosta, were more likely to conclude they were looking at the fallen vestiges of some ancient civilization, or refugees who had, in the course of their wanderings, forgotten the arts of metallurgy and civil governance. Such a conclusion would have made obvious common sense for people who assumed that all truly important knowledge had been revealed by God at the beginning of time, that cities had existed before the Flood, and that saw their own intellectual life largely as attempts to recover the lost wisdom of ancient Greeks and Romans.

早期的作者，面对没有国王、只使用石器的森林居民，不太可能把他们看作是原始人。十六世纪的学者，如西班牙传教士何塞·德·阿科斯塔（José de Acosta），更有可能得出结论，他们看到的是某种古代文明的堕落残余，或，这些难民在流浪的过程中忘记了冶金和公民管理的艺术。这样的结论对于那些认为所有真正重要的知识都是由上帝在开天辟地之时揭示出来的人来说是显而易见的常识，城市在大洪水之前就已经存在，而且他们认为自己的知识生活主要是试图恢复古希腊人和罗马人的失落智慧。

History, in Renaissance Europe of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, was not a story of progress. It was largely a series of disasters. Introducing the concept of a State of Nature didn’t exactly flip all this around, at least not immediately, but it did allow political philosophers after the seventeenth century to imagine people without the trappings of civilization as something other than degenerate savages; as a kind of humanity ‘in the raw’. And this, in turn, allowed them to ask a host of new questions about what it meant to be human. What social forms would still exist, even among people who had no recognizable form of law or government? Would marriage exist? What forms might it take? Would Natural Man tend to be naturally gregarious, or would people tend to avoid one another? Was there such a thing as natural religion?

在 15 至 16 世纪的文艺复兴时期的欧洲，历史不是一个进步的故事。它主要是一系列的灾难。引入自然国的概念并没有完全扭转这一切，至少没有立即扭转，但它确实让十七世纪后的政治哲学家们把没有文明外衣的人想象成退化的野蛮人以外的东西；想象成一种 “原始” 的人类。而这反过来又使他们能够提出一系列关于人类意味着什么的新问题。即使在没有可识别的法律或政府形式的人群中，什么社会形式仍然存在？婚姻会存在吗？它可能采取什么形式？自然人是否会倾向于自然聚居，还是人们会倾向于相互回避？是否存在自然宗教这种东西？

But the question still remains: why is it that by the eighteenth century, European intellectuals had come to fix on the idea of primordial freedom or, especially, equality, to such an extent that it seemed perfectly natural to ask a question like ‘what is the origin of inequality among men?’ This seems particularly odd considering how, prior to that time, most did not even consider social equality possible.

但问题仍然存在：为什么到了 18 世纪，欧洲知识分子已经固定在原始自由或特别是平等的观念上，以至于提出 “人与人之间不平等的起源是什么” 这样的问题似乎非常自然？考虑到在那之前，大多数人甚至不认为社会平等是可能的，这似乎特别奇怪。

First of all, a qualification is in order. A certain folk egalitarianism already existed in the Middle Ages, coming to the fore during popular festivals like carnival, May Day or Christmas, when much of society revelled in the idea of a ‘world turned upside down’, where all powers and authorities were knocked to the ground or made a mockery of. Often the celebrations were framed as a return to some primordial ‘age of equality’ – the Age of Cronus, or Saturn, or the land of Cockaygne. Sometimes, too, these ideals were invoked in popular revolts.

首先，需要做一个限定。某种民间平等主义在中世纪已经存在，在狂欢节、五一节或圣诞节等流行的节日里凸显出来，当时社会上很多人都陶醉于 “世界被颠覆” 的想法，所有的权力和权威都被打倒在地或被嘲弄了。庆祝活动往往被设定为回到某种原始的 “平等时代” —— 克洛诺斯时代，或土星时代，或科凯恩（Cockaygne）的土地。有时，这些理想也会在民众起义中被援引。

True, it’s never entirely clear how far such egalitarian ideals are merely a side effect of hierarchical social arrangements that obtained at ordinary times. Our notion that everyone is equal before the law, for instance, originally traces back to the idea that everyone is equal before the king, or emperor: since if one man is invested with absolute power, then obviously everyone else is equal in comparison. Early Christianity similarly insisted that all believers were (in some ultimate sense) equal in relation to God, whom they referred to as ‘the Lord’. As this illustrates, the overarching power under which ordinary mortals are all de facto equals need not be a real flesh-and-blood human; one of the whole points of creating a ‘carnival king’ or ‘May queen’ is that they exist in order to be dethroned.⁸

诚然，这种平等主义的理想在多大程度上仅仅是在普通时期获得的等级社会安排的副作用，这一点从来就不完全清楚。例如，我们关于法律面前人人平等的概念，最初可以追溯到国王或皇帝面前人人平等的想法：因为如果一个人被赋予了绝对的权力，那么显然其他人相比之下是平等的。早期基督教同样坚持认为，所有信徒（在某种终极意义上）在上帝面前都是平等的，他们称上帝为 “主”。正如这一点所说明的，普通人事实上都是平等的，在这种情况下，首要的权力不一定是真正有血有肉的人；创造一个 “狂欢节国王” 或 “五月女王” 的全部意义之一就是他们的存在是为了被推翻。⁸

Europeans educated in classical literature would also have been familiar with speculation about long-ago, happy, egalitarian orders that appear in Greco-Roman sources; and notions of equality, at least among Christian nations, were to be found in the concept of res publica, or commonwealth, which again looked to ancient precedents. All this is only to say that a state of equality was not utterly inconceivable to European intellectuals before the eighteenth century. None of it, however, explains why they came almost universally to assume that human beings, innocent of civilization, would ever exist in such a state. True, there were classical precedents for such ideas, but there were classical precedents for the opposite as well.⁹ For answers, we must return to arguments deployed to establish that the inhabitants of the Americas were fellow humans to begin with: to assert that, however exotic or even perverse their customs might seem, Native Americans were capable of making logical arguments in their own defence.

受过古典文学教育的欧洲人也会熟悉希腊·罗马资料中出现的关于很久以前的、幸福的、平等主义的秩序的猜测；平等的概念，至少在基督教国家中，可以在 res publica（或称公有制）的概念中找到，这也是参考古代的先例。所有这些只是想说，在 18 世纪之前，欧洲知识分子并非完全无法想象平等的状态。然而，这一切都不能解释为什么他们几乎普遍认为人类，在文明中是无辜的，会存在于这样一种状态。诚然，这种想法有古典的先例，但也有古典的先例是相反的。⁹为了找到答案，我们必须回到为确定美洲居民从一开始就是人类同胞而使用的论据：断言无论他们的习俗看起来多么异乎寻常甚至反常，美洲原住民都有能力为自己的辩护进行逻辑论证。

What we’re going to suggest is that American intellectuals – we are using the term ‘American’ as it was used at the time, to refer to indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere; and ‘intellectual’ to refer to anyone in the habit of arguing about abstract ideas – actually played a role in this conceptual revolution. It is very strange that this should be considered a particularly radical idea, but among mainstream intellectual historians today it is almost a heresy.

我们要提出的是，美洲知识分子 —— 我们使用的是当时使用的 “美洲人” 一词，指的是西半球的本土居民；而 “知识分子” 指的是任何有争论抽象概念习惯的人 —— 实际上在这场概念革命中发挥了作用。非常奇怪的是，这应该被认为是一个特别激进的想法，但在今天的主流思想史学家中，这几乎是一个异端。

What makes this especially odd is that no one denies that many European explorers, missionaries, traders, settlers and others who sojourned on American shores spent years learning native languages and perfecting their skills in conversation with native speakers; just as indigenous Americans did the work of learning Spanish, English, Dutch or French. Neither, we think, would anyone who has ever learned a truly alien language deny that doing so takes a great deal of imaginative work, trying to grasp unfamiliar concepts. We also know that missionaries typically conducted long philosophical debates as part of their professional duties; many others, on both sides, argued with one another either out of simple curiosity, or because they had immediate practical reasons to understand the other’s point of view. Finally, no one would deny that travel literature, and missionary relations – which often contained summaries of, or even extracts from, these exchanges – were popular literary genres, avidly followed by educated Europeans. Any middle-class household in eighteenth-century Amsterdam or Grenoble would have been likely to have on its shelves at the very least a copy of the Jesuit Relations of New France (as France’s North American colonies were then known), and one or two accounts written by voyagers to faraway lands. Such books were appreciated largely because they contained surprising and unprecedented ideas.¹⁰

让人感到特别奇怪的是，没有人否认，许多欧洲探险家、传教士、商人、定居者和其他在美洲海岸定居的人花了数年时间学习当地语言，完善他们与当地人交谈的技巧；就像美洲土著人学习西班牙语、英语、荷兰语或法语的工作。我们认为，任何曾经学习过真正的外来语言的人也不会否认，这样做需要大量的想象力工作，试图掌握陌生的概念。我们还知道，传教士通常会进行长时间的哲学辩论，作为他们职业职责的一部分；其他许多人，在双方中，要么是出于简单的好奇心，要么是因为他们有直接的实际理由来理解对方的观点，而相互争论。最后，没有人会否认，旅行文学和传教士关系 —— 通常包含这些交流的摘要，甚至是摘录 —— 是受欢迎的文学体裁，受到受过教育的欧洲人的热切关注。十八世纪阿姆斯特丹或格勒诺布尔的任何一个中产阶级家庭的书架上都可能至少有一本《新法兰西耶稣会关系》（当时法国的北美殖民地），以及一两本由远方的航海家写的报告。这些书之所以受到赞赏，主要是因为它们包含了令人惊讶和前所未有的想法。¹⁰

Historians are aware of all this. Yet the overwhelming majority still conclude that even when European authors explicitly say they are borrowing ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers, one should not take them seriously. It’s all just supposed to be some kind of misunderstanding, fabrication, or at best a naive projection of pre-existing European ideas. American intellectuals, when they appear in European accounts, are assumed to be mere representatives of some Western archetype of the ‘noble savage’ or sock-puppets, used as plausible alibis to an author who might otherwise get into trouble for presenting subversive ideas (deism, for example, or rational materialism, or unconventional views on marriage).¹¹

历史学家们都知道这一切。然而，绝大多数人仍然得出结论，即使欧洲作者明确说他们是从本土思想家那里借来的思想、概念和论点，人们也不应该认真对待它们。这一切都应该是某种误解、捏造，或者充其量是对欧洲原有思想的天真投射。美洲知识分子，当他们出现在欧洲人的叙述中时，被认为仅仅是一些西方 “高贵的野蛮人” 原型的代表，或者是傀儡，被用作作者的合理借口，否则他可能会因为提出颠覆性思想（例如，神论，或理性唯物主义，或对婚姻的非传统观点）而陷入困境。¹¹

Certainly, if one encounters an argument ascribed to a ‘savage’ in a European text that even remotely resembles anything to be found in Cicero or Erasmus, one is automatically supposed to assume that no ‘savage’ could possibly have really said it – or even that the conversation in question never really took place at all.¹² If nothing else, this habit of thought is very convenient for students of Western literature, themselves trained in Cicero and Erasmus, who might otherwise be forced to actually try to learn something about what indigenous people thought about the world, and above all what they made of Europeans.

当然，如果人们在欧洲文本中遇到一个归于 “野蛮人” 的论点，甚至与西塞罗或伊拉斯谟中的论点有一点相似，人们就会自动假定没有 “野蛮人” 可能真的说过这些话 —— 或者甚至假定有关的对话根本就没有发生过。¹²如果不出意外的话，这种思维习惯对西方文学的学生来说是非常方便的，他们本身就是在西塞罗和伊拉斯谟的训练下长大的，否则他们可能会被迫真正尝试了解一下土著人对世界的看法，尤其是他们对欧洲人的看法。

We intend to proceed in the opposite direction.

我们打算朝着相反的方向前进。

We will examine early missionary and travel accounts from New France – especially the Great Lakes region – since these were the accounts Rousseau himself was most familiar with, to get a sense of what its indigenous inhabitants did actually think of French society, and how they came to think of their own societies differently as a result. We will argue that indigenous Americans did indeed develop a very strong critical view of their invaders’ institutions: a view which focused first on these institutions’ lack of freedom, and only later, as they became more familiar with European social arrangements, on equality.

我们将研究新法国 —— 特别是大湖区 —— 的早期传教士和旅行记录，因为这些记录是卢梭本人最熟悉的，以了解其本土居民对法国社会的实际看法，以及他们如何因此而对自己的社会产生不同的看法。我们将论证，美洲原住民确实对他们的入侵者的机构形成了非常强烈的批评观点：这种观点首先关注的是这些机构缺乏自由，后来随着他们对欧洲社会安排更加熟悉，才开始关注平等。

One of the reasons that missionary and travel literature became so popular in Europe was precisely because it exposed its readers to this kind of criticism, along with providing a sense of social possibility: the knowledge that familiar ways were not the only ways, since – as these books showed – there were clearly societies in existence that did things very differently. We will suggest that there is a reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples. Because it was true.

传教士和旅行文学在欧洲如此受欢迎的原因之一，正是因为它让读者接触到这种批评，同时提供了一种社会可能性的感觉：知道熟悉的方式不是唯一的方式，因为 —— 正如这些书所显示的 —— 显然有一些社会存在着非常不同的做法。我们将建议，为什么这么多关键的启蒙思想家坚持认为他们的个人自由和政治平等的理想是受到美洲本土资源和例子的启发，是有原因的。因为这是事实。

IN WHICH WE CONSIDER WHAT THE INHABITANTS OF NEW FRANCE MADE OF THEIR EUROPEAN INVADERS, ESPECIALLY IN MATTERS OF GENEROSITY, SOCIABILITY, MATERIAL WEALTH, CRIME, PUNISHMENT AND LIBERTY

其中我们考虑了新法国的居民对他们的欧洲入侵者的评价，特别是在慷慨、社交、物质财富、犯罪、惩罚和自由方面

The ‘Age of Reason’ was an age of debate. The Enlightenment was rooted in conversation; it took place largely in cafés and salons. Many classic Enlightenment texts took the form of dialogues; most cultivated an easy, transparent, conversational style clearly inspired by the salon. (It was the Germans, back then, who tended to write in the obscure style for which French intellectuals have since become famous.) Appeal to ‘reason’ was above all a style of argument. The ideals of the French Revolution – liberty, equality and fraternity – took the form they did in the course of just such a long series of debates and conversations. All we’re going to suggest here is that those conversations stretched back further than Enlightenment historians assume.

“理性的时代” 是一个辩论的时代。启蒙运动植根于对话；它主要发生在咖啡馆和沙龙。许多经典的启蒙运动文本都采取了对话的形式；大多数人都培养了一种轻松、透明、对话式的风格，这显然是受到了沙龙的启发。（当时，德国人倾向于用晦涩的风格来写作，而法国知识分子后来也因此而闻名。）对 “理性” 的呼吁首先是一种争论的风格。法国大革命的理想 —— 自由、平等和博爱 —— 就是在这样一长串的辩论和谈话过程中形成的。我们在这里要提出的是，这些对话比启蒙运动的历史学家假设的还要久远。

Let’s begin by asking: what did the inhabitants of New France make of the Europeans who began to arrive on their shores in the sixteenth century?

让我们首先问一下：新法兰西的居民对 16 世纪开始抵达他们海岸的欧洲人有什么看法？

At that time, the region that came to be known as New France was inhabited largely by speakers of Montagnais-Naskapi, Algonkian and Iroquoian languages. Those closer to the coast were fishers, foresters and hunters, though most also practised horticulture; the Wendat (Huron),¹³ concentrated in major river valleys further inland, growing maize, squash and beans around fortified towns. Interestingly, early French observers attached little importance to such economic distinctions, especially since foraging or farming was, in either case, largely women’s work. The men, they noted, were primarily occupied in hunting and, occasionally, war, which meant they could in a sense be considered natural aristocrats. The idea of the ‘noble savage’ can be traced back to such estimations. Originally, it didn’t refer to nobility of character but simply to the fact that the Indian men concerned themselves with hunting and fighting, which back at home were largely the business of noblemen.

当时，被称为新法兰西的地区主要是由讲 Montagnais-Naskapi、Algonkian 和 Iroquoian 语言的人居住。离海岸较近的人是渔民、林务员和猎人，尽管大多数人也从事园艺工作；温达特人（休伦人）。¹³集中在内陆的主要河谷，在设防的城镇周围种植玉米、南瓜和豆子。有趣的是，早期的法国观察家并不重视这种经济上的区别，特别是由于在这两种情况下，觅食或耕作基本上都是妇女的工作。他们指出，男人们主要忙于狩猎，偶尔也忙于战争，这意味着他们在某种意义上可以被视为天然的贵族。“高贵的野蛮人” 的概念可以追溯到这种估计。最初，它并不是指性格上的高贵，而只是指印第安人关心自己的狩猎和战斗，而在国内这主要是贵族的事。

But if French assessments of the character of ‘savages’ tended to be decidedly mixed, the indigenous assessment of French character was distinctly less so. Father Pierre Biard, for example, was a former theology professor assigned in 1608 to evangelize the Algonkian-speaking Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, who had lived for some time next to a French fort. Biard did not think much of the Mi’kmaq, but reported that the feeling was mutual: ‘They consider themselves better than the French: “For,” they say, “you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.” They are saying these and like things continually.’¹⁴ What seemed to irritate Biard the most was that the Mi’kmaq would constantly assert that they were, as a result, ‘richer’ than the French. The French had more material possessions, the Mi’kmaq conceded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.

但是，如果说法国人对 “野蛮人” 性格的评价往往是褒贬不一的，那么土著人对法国人性格的评价则明显不那么好。例如，皮埃尔·比亚德（Pierre Biard）神父是一位前神学教授，1608 年被派往新斯科舍省向讲阿尔贡语的米克马克人传教，他们在一个法国堡垒旁边生活了一段时间。比亚德并不看好米克马克人，但他报告说，这种感觉是相互的：“他们认为自己比法国人好：” 因为，“他们说，‘你们总是在相互争斗和争吵；我们却和平地生活。你们嫉妒，总是互相诽谤；你们是小偷和骗子；你们贪婪，既不慷慨也不善良；至于我们，如果我们有一丁点面包，就会与邻居分享。’ 他们不断地说着这些和类似的话。”¹⁴最让比亚德恼火的是，米克马克人不断断言，他们因此比法国人 “更富有”。米克马克人承认，法国人拥有更多的物质财富；但他们拥有其他更多的资产：轻松、舒适和时间。

Twenty years later Brother Gabriel Sagard, a Recollect Friar,¹⁵ wrote similar things of the Wendat nation. Sagard was at first highly critical of Wendat life, which he described as inherently sinful (he was obsessed with the idea that Wendat women were all intent on seducing him), but by the end of his sojourn he had come to the conclusion their social arrangements were in many ways superior to those at home in France. In the following passages he was clearly echoing Wendat opinion: ‘They have no lawsuits and take little pains to acquire the goods of this life, for which we Christians torment ourselves so much, and for our excessive and insatiable greed in acquiring them we are justly and with reason reproved by their quiet life and tranquil dispositions.’¹⁶ Much like Biard’s Mi’kmaq, the Wendat were particularly offended by the French lack of generosity to one another: ‘They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.’¹⁷

20 年后，一位回教修士加布里埃尔·萨加德¹⁵对温达特民族写了类似的东西。萨加德起初对温达特人的生活提出了强烈的批评，他认为温达特人的生活本质上是罪恶的（他痴迷于温达特妇女都想勾引他的想法），但在他的旅居结束时，他得出结论，他们的社会安排在许多方面都优于法国国内的安排。在下面的段落中，他显然是在呼应温达特人的观点：“他们没有诉讼，也不怎么费力地获取我们基督徒如此折磨自己的今生之物，而我们在获取这些东西时过度贪婪，他们平静的生活和安宁的性格使我们受到了合理的指责”。¹⁶与比亚德的米克马克人一样，温达特人对法国人缺乏相互间的慷慨解囊特别反感：“他们相互款待，相互帮助，以至于所有人的必需品都得到了满足，在他们的城镇和村庄里没有任何贫穷的乞丐；当他们听到有人说法国有很多这样的贫困乞丐时，他们认为这是一件非常糟糕的事情，并认为这是由于我们缺乏慈善，并为此严厉指责我们。¹⁷

Wendat cast a similarly jaundiced eye at French habits of conversation. Sagard was surprised and impressed by his hosts’ eloquence and powers of reasoned argument, skills honed by near-daily public discussions of communal affairs; his hosts, in contrast, when they did get to see a group of Frenchmen gathered together, often remarked on the way they seemed to be constantly scrambling over each other and cutting each other off in conversation, employing weak arguments, and overall (or so the subtext seemed to be) not showing themselves to be particularly bright. People who tried to grab the stage, denying others the means to present their arguments, were acting in much the same way as those who grabbed the material means of subsistence and refused to share it; it is hard to avoid the impression that Americans saw the French as existing in a kind of Hobbesian state of ‘war of all against all’. (It’s probably worthy of remark that especially in this early contact period, Americans were likely to have known Europeans largely through missionaries, trappers, merchants and soldiers – that is, groups almost entirely composed of men. There were at first very few French women in the colonies, and fewer children. This probably had the effect of making the competitiveness and lack of mutual care among them seem all the more extreme.)

温达特人对法国人的谈话习惯也投以同样的鄙夷的目光。萨加德对他的主人（就是款待他的温达特人）的口才和论证能力感到惊讶和佩服，这些能力是通过几乎每天公开讨论公共事务而磨练出来的；相反，他的温达特人在看到一群法国人聚集在一起时，经常评论他们在谈话中似乎不断地互相争吵和切断联系，采用薄弱的论据，而且总体上（潜台词似乎是这样）没有显示出他们是特别聪明。那些试图抢占舞台、拒绝他人提出论点的人，其行为方式与那些抢占物质生活资料并拒绝分享的人差不多；很难避免这样的印象，即美洲人认为法国人存在于一种霍布斯式的 “所有人对所有人的战争” 的状态中。（也许值得一提的是，特别是在这个早期接触时期，美洲人可能主要是通过传教士、捕猎者、商人和士兵来了解欧洲人 —— 也就是说，这些群体几乎完全由男性组成。起初，殖民地的法国妇女非常少，儿童也更少。这可能使他们之间的竞争和缺乏相互关怀显得更加极端。）

Sagard’s account of his stay among the Wendat became an influential bestseller in France and across Europe: both Locke and Voltaire cited Le grand voyage du pays des Hurons as a principal source for their descriptions of American societies. The multi-authored and much more extensive Jesuit Relations, which appeared between 1633 and 1673, were also widely read and debated in Europe, and include many a similar remonstrance aimed at the French by Wendat observers. One of the most striking things about these seventy-one volumes of missionary field reports is that neither the Americans, nor their French interlocutors, appear to have had very much to say about ‘equality’ per se – for example, the words égal or égalité barely appear, and on those very few occasions when they do it’s almost always in reference to ‘equality of the sexes’ (something the Jesuits found particularly scandalous).

萨加德关于他在温达特人中逗留的记述，在法国和整个欧洲都成为有影响力的畅销书：洛克和伏尔泰都把《休伦人的大旅行》作为他们描述美洲社会的主要资料。1633 年至 1673 年期间出版的多部著作和更广泛的《耶稣会关系》也在欧洲被广泛阅读和讨论，其中包括许多由温达特观察家针对法国人提出的类似提醒。在这 71 卷传教士实地报告中，最引人注目的一点是，无论是美洲人还是他们的法国对话者，似乎都没有对 “平等” 本身有什么看法 —— 例如，égal 或 égalité 这些词几乎没有出现，而在极少数情况下，它们几乎都是指 “两性平等”（耶稣会士认为这是特别可耻的）。

This appears to be the case, irrespective of whether the Jesuits in question were arguing with the Wendat – who might not seem egalitarian in anthropological terms, since they had formal political offices and a stratum of war captives whom the Jesuits, at least, referred to as ‘slaves’ – or the Mi’kmaq or Montagnais-Naskapi, who were organized into what later anthropologists would consider egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Instead, we hear a multiplicity of American voices complaining about the competitiveness and selfishness of the French – and even more, perhaps, about their hostility to freedom.

这似乎是事实，无论有关耶稣会士是在与温达特人争论 —— 从人类学的角度来看，温达特人可能并不平等，因为他们有正式的政治职务和一个被耶稣会士称为 “奴隶” 的战俘阶层 —— 还是米克马克人或蒙塔格奈人·纳斯卡皮人，他们被组织成后来人类学家认为是平等的狩猎·采集者队伍。相反，我们听到许多美洲人抱怨法国人的竞争和自私 —— 甚至更多，也许是抱怨他们对自由的敌视。

That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these exchanges: both sides agreed this was the case. What they differed on was whether or not individual liberty was desirable.

在这些交流中，美洲原住民生活在普遍自由的社会中，而欧洲人则不然，这从来就不是一个真正的辩论问题：双方都同意这是事实。他们的分歧在于，个人自由是否是可取的。

This is one area in which early missionary or travellers’ accounts of the Americas pose a genuine conceptual challenge to most readers today. Most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’ observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of ourselves; unlike indigenous Americans, who represent an essentially alien, perhaps even unknowable Other. But in fact, in many ways, the authors of these texts were nothing like us. When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty – or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology¹⁸ – indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones.

这是早期传教士或旅行者对美洲的描述对今天大多数读者构成真正概念上的挑战的一个领域。我们中的大多数人只是想当然地认为，“西方” 观察者，甚至是 17 世纪的观察者，只是我们自己的早期版本；与美洲本土不同，他们代表着一个本质上陌生的、也许甚至是不可知的他者。但事实上，在许多方面，这些文本的作者与我们完全不同。当涉及到个人自由、男女平等、性道德或人民主权等问题时，甚至在这个问题上，深度心理学的理论也是如此¹⁸ —— 美洲本土的态度很可能比 17 世纪的欧洲态度更接近读者自己的态度。

These differing views on individual liberty are especially striking. Nowadays, it’s almost impossible for anyone living in a liberal democracy to say they are against freedom – at least in the abstract (in practice, of course, our ideas are usually much more nuanced). This is one of the lasting legacies of the Enlightenment and of the American and French Revolutions. Personal freedom, we tend to believe, is inherently good (even if some of us also feel that a society based on total individual liberty – one which took it so far as to eliminate police, prisons or any sort of apparatus of coercion – would instantly collapse into violent chaos). Seventeenth-century Jesuits most certainly did not share this assumption. They tended to view individual liberty as animalistic. In 1642, the Jesuit missionary Le Jeune wrote of the Montagnais-Naskapi:

这些关于个人自由的不同观点尤其引人注目。如今，生活在自由主义民主国家的人几乎不可能说他们反对自由 —— 至少在抽象意义上是这样（当然，在实践中，我们的想法通常要细致得多）。这是启蒙运动以及美洲和法国革命的持久遗产之一。我们倾向于相信，个人自由本质上是好的（即使我们中的一些人也觉得，一个基于完全个人自由的社会 —— 一个将其发展到消除警察、监狱或任何形式的强制装置的社会 —— 会立即崩溃，陷入暴力混乱）。十七世纪的耶稣会士当然不同意这种假设。他们倾向于将个人自由视为动物性的。1642 年，耶稣会传教士 Le Jeune 写道：“蒙塔格奈人（Montagnais-Naskapi）：

They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.¹⁹

他们认为，根据出生的权利，他们应该享受野驴驹的自由，不向任何人致意，除非他们愿意。他们责备了我一百次，因为我们害怕我们的队长，而他们却嘲笑和取笑他们的队长。他们首领的所有权力都在他的舌头上；因为他只要能说会道，就很有权力；而且，即使他喋喋不休、喋喋不休，也不会被服从，除非他取悦野人。¹⁹

In the considered opinion of the Montagnais-Naskapi, however, the French were little better than slaves, living in constant terror of their superiors. Such criticism appears regularly in Jesuit accounts; what’s more, it comes not just from those who lived in nomadic bands, but equally from townsfolk like the Wendat. The missionaries, moreover, were willing to concede that this wasn’t all just rhetoric on the Americans’ part. Even Wendat statesmen couldn’t compel anyone to do anything they didn’t wish to do. As Father Lallemant, whose correspondence provided an initial model for The Jesuit Relations, noted of the Wendat in 1644:

然而，在蒙塔格奈人深思熟虑的观点中，法国人比奴隶好不了多少，一直生活在对上级的恐惧中。这样的批评经常出现在耶稣会的记述中；更重要的是，这种批评不仅来自那些生活在游牧部落的人，也同样来自温达特人等城镇居民。此外，传教士们也愿意承认，这并不全是美洲人的说辞。即使是温达特人的政治家也不能强迫任何人做他们不愿意做的事情。正如拉勒芒神父（他的书信为《耶稣会关系》提供了最初的范本）在 1644 年指出的温达特人。

I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever – so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger … ²⁰

我相信，世界上没有任何一个民族比他们更自由，更不允许他们的意志服从任何权力 —— 以至于这里的父亲对他们的孩子没有控制权，船长对他们的臣民没有控制权，国家的法律对他们中的任何一个都没有控制权，除非每个人都愿意服从它们。没有任何惩罚是施加给有罪的人的，也没有任何罪犯在不确定其生命和财产没有危险的情况下…… ²⁰

Lallemant’s account gives a sense of just how politically challenging some of the material to be found in the Jesuit Relations must have been to European audiences of the time, and why so many found it fascinating. After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective. Actually, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance that they might take’.

拉勒芒的叙述让人感觉到《耶稣会关系》中的一些材料对当时的欧洲观众来说是多么具有政治挑战性，以及为什么这么多人觉得它很吸引人。在阐述了连杀人犯都能逍遥法外是多么可耻之后，这位好父亲承认，如果作为一种维持和平的手段，温达特人的司法系统并非毫无作用。事实上，它的效果出奇地好。温达特人不惩罚罪犯，而是坚持让罪犯的整个家族或宗族进行赔偿。这使得每个人都有责任控制好自己的亲属。拉勒芒解释说：“受惩罚的不是有罪的人，而是 ‘必须为个人的罪行做出补偿的公众’。如果一个休伦人杀死了一个阿尔冈昆人或另一个休伦人，整个国家都会聚集在一起，商定应付给悲伤的亲属的礼物数量，‘以阻止他们可能采取的报复’。”

Wendat ‘captains’, as Lallemant then goes on to describe, ‘urge their subjects to provide what is needed; no one is compelled to it, but those who are willing bring publicly what they wish to contribute; it seems as if they vied with one another according to the amount of their wealth, and as the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions.’ More remarkable still, he concedes: ‘this form of justice restrains all these peoples, and seems more effectually to repress disorders than the personal punishment of criminals does in France,’ despite being ‘a very mild proceeding, which leaves individuals in such a spirit of liberty that they never submit to any Laws and obey no other impulse than that of their own will’.²¹

拉勒芒接着描述道，“温达特人的 ‘队长’ 敦促他们的臣民提供所需的东西；没有人被迫这样做，但那些愿意公开提供他们想要的东西的人；似乎他们根据自己财富的多少互相争夺，以及对荣誉的渴望和对公共福利的关心促使他们在类似场合这样做。更难能可贵的是，他承认：“这种司法形式约束了所有这些人，似乎比法国对罪犯的个人惩罚更有效地抑制了混乱”，尽管是 “一种非常温和的程序，它使个人处于一种自由的精神中，他们从不服从任何法律，除了他们自己的意愿外不服从任何其他冲动。”²¹

There are a number of things worth noting here. One is that it makes clear that some people were indeed considered wealthy. Wendat society was not ‘economically egalitarian’ in that sense. However, there was a difference between what we’d consider economic resources – like land, which was owned by families, worked by women, and whose products were largely disposed of by women’s collectives – and the kind of ‘wealth’ being referred to here, such as wampum (a word applied to strings and belts of beads, manufactured from the shells of Long Island’s quahog clam) or other treasures, which largely existed for political purposes.

这里有许多值得注意的地方。一是它清楚地表明，有些人确实被认为是富有的。温达特社会在这个意义上不是 “经济上的平等主义”。然而，我们所认为的经济资源 —— 如土地，由家庭拥有，由妇女耕作，其，产品主要由妇女集体处理 —— 与这里提到的那种 “财富”，如 “万普姆”，（wampum，适用于珠串和珠带的词，由长岛 quahog 蛤蜊的壳制造）或其他宝物之间是有区别的，它们主要为政治目的存在。

Wealthy Wendat men hoarded such precious things largely to be able to give them away on dramatic occasions like these. Neither in the case of land and agricultural products, nor that of wampum and similar valuables, was there any way to transform access to material resources into power – at least, not the kind of power that might allow one to make others work for you, or compel them to do anything they did not wish to do. At best, the accumulation and adroit distribution of riches might make a man more likely to aspire to political office (to become a ‘chief’ or ‘captain’ – the French sources tend to use these terms in an indiscriminate fashion); but as the Jesuits all continually emphasized, merely holding political office did not give anyone the right to give anybody orders either. Or, to be completely accurate, an office holder could give all the orders he or she liked, but no one was under any particular obligation to follow them.

富裕的温达特人囤积这些珍贵的东西，主要是为了能在这样的戏剧性场合把它们送出去。无论是土地和农产品，还是万普姆和类似的贵重物品，都没有办法将获得的物质资源转化为权力 —— 至少，不是那种可以让人为你工作的权力，或者强迫他们做他们不愿意做的事情。充其量，财富的积累和巧妙分配可能使一个人更有可能渴望获得政治职位（成为 “首领”（chief） 或 “上尉”（captain） —— 法国资料中往往不加区分地使用这些术语）；但正如耶稣会士们不断强调的那样，仅仅拥有政治职位也不能使任何人有权利对任何人发号施令。或者，完全准确地说，任职者可以发出他或她喜欢的所有命令，但没有人有任何特别的义务来遵守这些命令。

To the Jesuits, of course, all this was outrageous. In fact, their attitude towards indigenous ideals of liberty is the exact opposite of the attitude most French people or Canadians tend to hold today: that, in principle, freedom is an altogether admirable ideal. Father Lallemant, though, was willing to admit that in practice such a system worked quite well; it created ‘much less disorder than there is in France’ – but, as he noted, the Jesuits were opposed to freedom in principle:

当然，对耶稣会士来说，这一切都很无耻。事实上，他们对本土自由理想的态度与今天大多数法国人或加拿大人倾向于持有的态度完全相反：原则上，自由是一个完全令人钦佩的理想。不过，拉勒芒神父愿意承认，在实践中，这样的制度运行得相当好；它造成的 “混乱比法国要少得多” —— 但正如他所指出的，耶稣会士在原则上反对自由。

This, without doubt, is a disposition quite contrary to the spirit of the Faith, which requires us to submit not only our wills, but our minds, our judgments, and all the sentiments of man to a power unknown to our senses, to a Law that is not of earth, and that is entirely opposed to the laws and sentiments of corrupt nature. Add to this that the laws of the Country, which to them seem most just, attack the purity of the Christian life in a thousand ways, especially as regards their marriages … ²²

毫无疑问，这是一种与信仰的精神完全相反的倾向，信仰要求我们不仅要把我们的意志，而且要把我们的思想、判断和人的所有情感服从于一种我们感官所不知道的力量，服从于一种不属于地球的法律，而且与腐败的自然界的法律和情感完全对立。再加上国家的法律，在他们看来是最公正的，却以无数种方式攻击基督徒生活的纯洁性，特别是在他们的婚姻方面…… ²²

The Jesuit Relations are full of this sort of thing: scandalized missionaries frequently reported that American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will. This, for the Jesuits, was an outrage. Such sinful conduct, they believed, was just the extension of a more general principle of freedom, rooted in natural dispositions, which they saw as inherently pernicious. The ‘wicked liberty of the savages’, one insisted, was the single greatest impediment to their ‘submitting to the yoke of the law of God’.²³ Even finding terms to translate concepts like ‘lord’, ‘commandment’ or ‘obedience’ into indigenous languages was extremely difficult; explaining the underlying theological concepts, well-nigh impossible.

《耶稣会关系》中充满了这种内容：受到丑化的传教士经常报告说，美洲妇女被认为可以完全控制自己的身体，因此，未婚，妇女有性自由，已婚妇女可以随意离婚。对耶稣会士来说，这就是一种侮辱。他们认为，这种罪恶的行为只是一种更普遍的自由原则的延伸，它植根于自然倾向，而他们认为这种自由本身就是有害的。一个人坚持认为，“野蛮人的邪恶自由” 是阻碍他们 “屈服于上帝律法的枷锁” 的最大障碍。²³即使找到术语将 “主”、“诫命” 或 “服从” 等概念翻译成本土语言也非常困难；解释潜在的神学概念则几乎不可能。

IN WHICH WE SHOW HOW EUROPEANS LEARNED FROM (NATIVE) AMERICANS ABOUT THE CONNECTION BETWEEN REASONED DEBATE, PERSONAL FREEDOMS AND THE REFUSAL OF ARBITRARY POWER

其中，我们展示了欧洲人是如何从（本土）美洲人那里了解到合理的辩论、个人自由和拒绝专制权力之间的联系的。

In political terms, then, French and Americans were not arguing about equality but about freedom. About the only specific reference to political equality that appears in the seventy-one volumes of The Jesuit Relations occurs almost as an aside, in an account of an event in 1648. It happened in a settlement of Christianized Wendat near the town of Quebec. After a disturbance caused by a shipload of illegal liquor finding its way into the community, the governor persuaded Wendat leaders to agree to a prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and published an edict to that effect – crucially, the governor notes, backed up by threat of punishment. Father Lallemant, again, records the story. For him, this was an epochal event:

在政治方面，法国人和美洲人争论的不是平等而是自由。在《耶稣会关系》的 71 卷书中，关于政治平等的唯一具体描述几乎是作为一个旁观者出现的，是在 1648 年的一个事件的描述中。这件事发生在魁北克镇附近的一个基督教化的温达特人定居点。一船非法酒类进入该社区后引发了一场骚乱，总督说服温达特人领袖同意禁止酒精饮料，并为此发布了一项法令 —— 总督指出，关键是要以惩罚的威胁作为支撑。拉勒芒神父再次记录了这个故事。对他来说，这是一个划时代的事件。

‘From the beginning of the world to the coming of the French, the Savages have never known what it was so solemnly to forbid anything to their people, under any penalty, however slight. They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.’²⁴

从世界之初到法国人的到来，野蛮人从来都不知道什么是庄严地禁止他们的人民做任何事情，无论有多么轻微的惩罚，都是如此。他们是自由的人，每个人都认为自己和其他人一样重要；他们只在自己高兴的情况下服从他们的酋长。²⁴

Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, is its expression. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of ‘equality before the law’, which is ultimately equality before the sovereign – that is, once again, equality in common subjugation. Americans, by contrast, were equal insofar as they were equally free to obey or disobey orders as they saw fit. The democratic governance of the Wendat and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, which so impressed later European readers, was an expression of the same principle: if no compulsion was allowed, then obviously such social coherence as did exist had to be created through reasoned debate, persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus.

这里的平等是自由的直接延伸；事实上，是自由的表达。它也与更熟悉的 （欧亚）的 “法律面前人人平等” 的概念几乎没有共同之处，后者最终是主权者面前的平等 —— 也就是说，再次是共同征服中的平等。相比之下，美洲人是平等的，因为他们有同样的自由，可以按照自己的意愿服从或不服从命令。给后来的欧洲读者留下深刻印象的温达特人和豪德诺萨尼五族的民主治理，也是同一原则的体现：如果不允许强迫，那么显然，确实存在的这种社会一致性必须通过合理的辩论、有说服力的论证和建立社会共识来创造。

Here we return to the matter with which we began: the European Enlightenment as the apotheosis of the principle of open and rational debate. We’ve already mentioned Sagard’s grudging respect for the Wendat facility in logical argumentation (a theme that also runs through most Jesuit accounts). At this point, it is important to bear in mind that the Jesuits were the intellectuals of the Catholic world. Trained in classical rhetoric and techniques of disputation, Jesuits had learned the Americans’ languages primarily so as to be able to argue with them, to persuade them of the superiority of the Christian faith. Yet they regularly found themselves startled and impressed by the quality of the counterarguments they had to contend with.

在这里，我们又回到了我们开始时的问题：欧洲启蒙运动是公开和理性辩论原则的神化。我们已经提到了萨加德对温达特人的逻辑论证能力的勉强尊重（这个主题也贯穿了大多数耶稣会士的叙述）。在这一点上，重要的是要记住，耶稣会士是天主教世界的知识分子。耶稣会士接受过古典修辞和辩论技巧的训练，他们学习美洲人的语言主要是为了能够与他们争论，说服他们相信基督教信仰的优越性。然而，他们经常发现，他们不得不面对的反驳的质量让他们感到震惊和印象深刻。

How could such rhetorical facility have come to those with no awareness of the works of Varro and Quintilian? In considering the matter, the Jesuits almost always noted the openness with which public affairs were conducted. So, Father Le Jeune, Superior of the Jesuits in Canada in the 1630s: ‘There are almost none of them incapable of conversing or reasoning very well, and in good terms, on matters within their knowledge. The councils, held almost every day in the Villages, and on almost all matters, improve their capacity for talking.’ Or, in Lallemant’s words: ‘I can say in truth that, as regards intelligence, they are in no wise inferior to Europeans and to those who dwell in France. I would never have believed that, without instruction, nature could have supplied a most ready and vigorous eloquence, which I have admired in many Hurons; or more clear-sightedness in public affairs, or a more discreet management in things to which they are accustomed.’²⁵ Some Jesuits went further, remarking – not without a trace of frustration – that New World savages seemed rather cleverer overall than the people they were used to dealing with at home (e.g. ‘they nearly all show more intelligence in their business, speeches, courtesies, intercourse, tricks, and subtleties, than do the shrewdest citizens and merchants in France’).²⁶

对于那些不了解瓦罗和昆体良作品的人来说，这样的修辞手法怎么会出现呢？在考虑这个问题时，耶稣会士们几乎总是注意到公共事务的公开性。因此，1630 年代在加拿大的耶稣会会长勒·朱尼神父说：“在他们的知识范围内，几乎没有人不能很好地交谈或推理，而且是以良好的条件。几乎每天都在村子里举行的会议，以及几乎所有的事情，都提高了他们的谈话能力。或者，用拉勒芒的话说我可以实话实说，就智力而言，他们丝毫不比欧洲人和居住在法国的人逊色。我绝不相信，如果没有教育，自然界可以提供一种最容易和最有力的口才，我在许多休伦人身上看到了这种口才；或者在公共事务上有更清晰的洞察力，或者在他们所习惯的事情上有更谨慎的管理。²⁵一些耶稣会士走得更远，他们不无沮丧地表示，新世界的野蛮人总体上似乎比他们在国内习惯于与之打交道的人更聪明（例如，“他们在 、演讲、礼节、交往、技巧和微妙之处，几乎都比法国最精明的公民和商人表现得更聪明”）。²⁶

Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic relation between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political debate and a taste for reasoned argument. It’s true that Native American political leaders, who in most cases had no means to compel anyone to do anything they had not agreed to do, were famous for their rhetorical powers. Even hardened European generals pursuing genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples often reported themselves reduced to tears by their powers of eloquence. Still, persuasiveness need not take the form of logical argumentation; it can just as easily involve appeal to sentiment, whipping up passions, deploying poetic metaphors, appealing to myth or proverbial wisdom, employing irony and indirection, humour, insult, or appeals to prophecy or revelation; and the degree to which one privileges any of these has everything to do with the rhetorical tradition to which the speaker belongs, and the presumed dispositions of their audience.

那么，耶稣会士清楚地认识到并承认拒绝专断的权力、开放和包容的政治辩论以及对合理论证的喜好之间的内在关系。诚然，美洲原住民的政治领袖，在大多数情况下，没有办法强迫任何人做他们不同意做的事情，但他们的修辞能力却很有名。即使是对原住民进行种族灭绝运动的顽固的欧洲将军也经常报告说，他们的雄辩能力使自己流泪。不过，说服力不需要采取逻辑论证的形式；它也可以很容易地包括诉诸情感、煽动激情、运用诗意的比喻、诉诸神话或谚语的智慧、采用讽刺和暗示、幽默、侮辱或呼吁预言或启示；而其中任何一种特权的程度都与说话者所属的修辞传统和他们的听众的假定倾向有关。

It was largely the speakers of Iroquoian languages such as the Wendat, or the five Haudenosaunee nations to their south, who appear to have placed such weight on reasoned debate – even finding it a form of pleasurable entertainment in own right. This fact alone had major historical repercussions. Because it appears to have been exactly this form of debate – rational, sceptical, empirical, conversational in tone – which before long came to be identified with the European Enlightenment as well. And, just like the Jesuits, Enlightenment thinkers and democratic revolutionaries saw it as intrinsically connected with the rejection of arbitrary authority, particularly that which had long been assumed by the clergy.

主要是讲伊鲁克语的人，如温达特人，或他们南方的五个豪德诺萨尼民族，似乎对理性的辩论如此重视 —— 甚至认为它本身就是一种愉快的娱乐。仅这一事实就产生了重大的历史影响。因为似乎正是这种辩论形式 —— 理性的、怀疑的、经验性的、谈话性的语气 —— 在不久之后也被认定为欧洲启蒙运动。与耶稣会士一样，启蒙运动的思想家和民主革命者认为它与拒绝专制的权威，特别是长期以来由神职人员承担的权威有着内在的联系。

Let’s gather together the strands of our argument so far.

让我们把到目前为止的论证内容集中起来。

By the mid seventeenth century, legal and political thinkers in Europe were beginning to toy with the idea of an egalitarian State of Nature; at least in the minimal sense of a default state that might be shared by societies which they saw as lacking government, writing, religion, private property or other significant means of distinguishing themselves from one another. Terms like ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ were just beginning to come into common usage in intellectual circles – around the time, indeed, that the first French missionaries set out to evangelize the inhabitants of what are now Nova Scotia and Quebec.²⁷ Europe’s reading public was growing increasingly curious about what such primordial societies might have been like. But they had no particular disposition to imagine men and women living in a State of Nature as especially ‘noble’, let alone as rational sceptics and champions of individual liberty.²⁸ This latter perspective was the product of a dialogic encounter.

到 17 世纪中叶，欧洲的法律和政治思想家们开始玩弄平等主义的自然状态的想法；至少在最小的意义上，他们认为缺乏政府、文字、宗教、私有财产或其他重要的区分彼此的手段的社会可以共享一个默认状态。像 “平等” 和 “不平等” 这样的术语刚刚开始在知识界得到普遍使用 —— 事实上，就是大约在第一批法国传教士开始向现在的新斯科舍和魁北克的居民传教的时候。²⁷欧洲的读书人对这种原始社会可能是什么样子的好奇心越来越强。但他们并不特别倾向于把生活在自然状态下的男人和女人想象得特别 “高贵”，更不用说把他们想象成理性的怀疑论者和个人自由的倡导者。²⁸这后一种观点是对话性接触的产物。

As we’ve seen, at first neither side – not the colonists of New France, nor their indigenous interlocutors – had much to say about ‘equality’. Rather, the argument was about liberty and mutual aid, or what might even be better called freedom and communism. We should be clear about what we mean by the latter term. Since the early nineteenth century, there have been lively debates about whether there was ever a thing that might legitimately be referred to as ‘primitive communism’. At the centre of these debates, almost invariably, were the indigenous societies of the Northeast Woodlands – ever since Friedrich Engels used the Iroquois as a prime example of primitive communism in his The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Here, ‘communism’ always refers to communal ownership, particularly of productive resources. As we’ve already observed, many American societies could be considered somewhat ambiguous in this sense: women owned and worked the fields individually, even though they stored and disposed of the products collectively; men owned their own tools and weapons individually, even if they typically shared out the game and spoils.

正如我们所看到的，起初双方 —— 无论是新法兰西的殖民者，还是他们的土著对话者 —— 都没有对 “平等” 有太多的发言权。相反，争论的焦点是自由和互助，或者甚至可以说是自由和共产主义。我们应该清楚地了解后一个术语的含义。自 19 世纪初以来，关于是否有一种东西可以合法地被称为 “原始共产主义”，一直存在着激烈的辩论。这些争论的中心，几乎都是东北林地的原住民社会 —— 自从弗里德里希·恩格斯在他的《家庭、私有财产和国家的起源》（1884）中把易洛魁人作为原始共产主义的主要例子以来。在这里，“共产主义” 总是指公有制，特别是生产资源的公有制。正如我们已经观察到的，许多美洲社会在这个意义上可以被认为是有些模糊的：妇女单独拥有和耕种田地，即使她们集体储存和处理产品；男人单独拥有自己的工具和武器，即使他们通常分享游戏和战利品。

However, there’s another way to use the word ‘communism’: not as a property regime but in the original sense of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. There’s also a certain minimal, ‘baseline’ communism which applies in all societies; a feeling that if another person’s needs are great enough (say, they are drowning), and the cost of meeting them is modest enough (say, they are asking for you to throw them a rope), then of course any decent person would comply. Baseline communism of this sort could even be considered the very grounds of human sociability, since it is only one’s bitter enemies who would not be treated this way. What varies is just how far it is felt such baseline communism should properly extend.

然而，还有另一种方式来使用 “共产主义” 这个词：不是作为一种财产制度，而是在 “各尽所能，各取所需” 的原始意义上。还有某种最低限度的、适用于所有社会的 “基线” 共产主义；一种感觉是，如果另一个人的需求足够大（例如，他们正在溺水），而满足这些需求的成本足够低（例如，他们要求你扔给他们一根绳子），那么任何正直的人当然会遵守。这种基线共产主义甚至可以被认为是人类社会性的基础，因为只有自己的死敌才不会被这样对待。不同的是，人们认为这种基线共产主义应该适当延伸到什么程度。

In many societies – and American societies of that time appear to have been among them – it would have been quite inconceivable to refuse a request for food. For seventeenth-century Frenchmen in North America, this was clearly not the case: their range of baseline communism appears to have been quite restricted, and did not extend to food and shelter – something which scandalized Americans. But just as we earlier witnessed a confrontation between two very different concepts of equality, here we are ultimately witnessing a clash between very different concepts of individualism. Europeans were constantly squabbling for advantage; societies of the Northeast Woodlands, by contrast, guaranteed one another the means to an autonomous life – or at least ensured no man or woman was subordinated to any other. Insofar as we can speak of communism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individual freedom.

在许多社会中 —— 当时的美洲社会似乎也在其中 —— 拒绝食物要求是相当不可思议的。对于十七世纪在北美的法国人来说，情况显然不是这样的：他们的基线共产主义范围似乎相当有限，并没有延伸到食物和住所 —— 这让美洲人感到羞愧。但是，正如我们先前见证了两种截然不同的平等观念之间的对抗一样，我们在这里最终见证了截然不同的个人主义观念之间的冲突。欧洲人不断地争夺利益；相比之下，东北林地的社会则保证彼此都能过上自主的生活 —— 或者至少保证没有男人或女人从属于任何其他人。就我们可以谈论的共产主义而言，它的存在不是为了反对而是为了支持个人自由。

The same could be said of indigenous political systems that Europeans encountered across much of the Great Lakes region. Everything operated to ensure that no one’s will would be subjugated to that of anyone else. It was only over time, as Americans learned more about Europe, and Europeans began to consider what it would mean to translate American ideals of individual liberty into their own societies, that the term ‘equality’ began to gain ground as a feature of the discourse between them.

欧洲人在大湖区的大部分地区遇到的土著政治制度也是如此。一切运作都是为了确保没有人的意志会屈从于其他人的意志。只是随着时间的推移，随着美洲人对欧洲有了更多的了解，欧洲人也开始考虑将美洲的个人自由理想转化为他们自己的社会意味着什么，“平等” 一词才开始在他们之间的讨论中占据一席之地。

IN WHICH WE INTRODUCE THE WENDAT PHILOSOPHER-STATESMAN KANDIARONK, AND EXPLAIN HOW HIS VIEWS ON HUMAN NATURE AND SOCIETY TOOK ON NEW LIFE IN THE SALONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT EUROPE (INCLUDING AN ASIDE ON THE CONCEPT OF ‘SCHISMOGENESIS’)

其中我们介绍了温达特哲学家·国家主义者坎迪阿伦克，并解释了他关于人性和社会的观点如何在欧洲的启蒙沙龙中获得新的生命（包括关于 “分裂生成” 概念的旁白）。

In order to understand how the indigenous critique – that consistent moral and intellectual assault on European society, widely voiced by Native American observers from the seventeenth century onwards – evolved, and its full impact on European thinking, we first need to understand something about the role of two men: an impoverished French aristocrat named Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de la Hontan, and an unusually brilliant Wendat statesman named Kandiaronk.

为了了解土著人的批判 —— 从 17 世纪起，美洲本土观察家广泛表达的对欧洲社会的一贯道德和思想攻击 —— 是如何演变的，以及它对欧洲思想的全面影响，我们首先需要了解两个人的作用：一个是，名叫路易·阿曼德·洛姆·达尔塞的法国贵族，拉洪坦男爵，另一个是异常出色的温达特政治家坎迪阿伦克。

In 1683, Lahontan (as he came to be known), then seventeen years old, joined the French army and was posted to Canada. Over the course of the next decade he took part in a number of campaigns and exploratory expeditions, eventually attaining the rank of deputy to the Governor-General, the Comte de Frontenac. In the process he became fluent in both Algonkian and Wendat, and – by his own account at least – good friends with a number of indigenous political figures. Lahontan later claimed that, because he was something of a sceptic in religious matters and a political enemy of the Jesuits, these figures were willing to share with him their actual opinions about Christian teachings. One of them was Kandiaronk.

1683 年，时年 17 岁的拉洪坦加入了法国军队并被派往加拿大。在接下来的十年里，他参加了许多战役和探险，最终获得了总督弗朗特纳克伯爵的副手职位。在这个过程中，他精通阿尔冈克语和温达语，而且 —— 至少根据他自己的说法 —— 与一些土著政治人物成了好朋友。拉洪坦后来声称，由于他在宗教问题上是个怀疑论者，而且是耶稣会的政敌，这些人物愿意与他分享他们对基督教教义的实际看法。其中一位是坎迪阿伦克。

A key strategist of the Wendat Confederacy, a coalition of four Iroquoian-speaking peoples, Kandiaronk (his name literally meant ‘the muskrat’ and the French often referred to him simply as ‘Le Rat’) was at that time engaged in a complex geopolitical game, trying to play the English, French and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee off against each other, with the initial aim of averting a disastrous Haudenosaunee assault on the Wendat, but with the long-term goal of creating a comprehensive indigenous alliance to hold off the settler advance.²⁹ Everyone who met him, friend or foe, admitted he was a truly remarkable individual: a courageous warrior, brilliant orator and unusually skilful politician. He was also, to the very end of his life, a staunch opponent of Christianity.³⁰

坎迪阿伦克是温达特联盟（由四个讲伊鲁古语的民族组成的联盟）的关键战略家（他的名字的字面意思是 “麝鼠”，法国人经常把他简单地称为 “老鼠”），当时他正在参与一场复杂的地缘政治游戏。试图让英国人、法国人和豪德诺萨尼五族相互博弈，最初的目的是避免豪德诺萨尼人对温达特的灾难性攻击，但长期目标是建立一个全面的土著联盟，以抵御定居者的入侵。²⁹所有见过他的人，无论是朋友还是敌人，都承认他是一个真正了不起的人：一个勇敢的战士、出色的演说家和异常娴熟的政治家。直到生命的最后一刻，他也是基督教的坚定反对者。³⁰

Lahontan’s own career came to a bad end. Despite having successfully defended Nova Scotia against an English fleet, he ran foul of its governor and was forced to flee French territory. Convicted in absentia of insubordination, he spent most of the next decade in exile, wandering about Europe trying, unsuccessfully, to negotiate a return to his native France. By 1702, Lahontan was living in Amsterdam and very much down on his luck, described by those who met him as penniless vagrant and freelance spy. All that was to change when he published a series of books about his adventures in Canada.

拉洪坦自己的职业生涯也走到了一个糟糕的结局。尽管他成功地保卫了新斯科舍省，抵御了英国舰队的进攻，但他触犯了该省省长，被迫逃离法国领土。在缺席的情况下，他被判定犯有不服从命令罪，在接下来的十年里，他大部分时间都在流亡，在欧洲四处游荡，试图通过谈判返回他的祖国法国，但没有成功。到 1702 年，拉洪丹住在阿姆斯特丹，非常倒霉，遇到他的人都说他是身无分文的流浪汉和自由间谍。当他出版了一系列关于他在加拿大的冒险经历的书籍之后，这一切都将发生变化。

Two were memoirs of his American adventures. The third, entitled Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled (1703), comprised a series of four conversations between Lahontan and Kandiaronk, in which the Wendat sage – voicing opinions based on his own ethnographic observations of Montreal, New York and Paris – casts an extremely critical eye on European mores and ideas about religion, politics, health and sexual life. These books won a wide audience, and before long Lahontan had become something of a minor celebrity. He settled at the court of Hanover, which was also the home base for Leibniz, who befriended and supported him before Lahontan fell ill and died, around 1715.

其中两部是他的美洲冒险回忆录。第三本名为《与一位游历过的有头脑的野人的好奇对话》（1703，以下简称《对话》），由拉洪坦和坎迪阿伦克之间的四次对话组成，其中温达特圣人根据自己对蒙特利尔、纽约和巴黎的人种学观察发表了意见，对欧洲的宗教、政治、健康和性生活的习俗和观念提出了极为尖锐的批评。这些书赢得了广泛的读者，不久之后，拉洪丹就成了一个小名人。他在汉诺威宫廷定居，那里也是莱布尼茨的大本营，莱布尼茨在拉洪丹生病和去世前（大约 1715 年）结识并支持他。

Most criticism of Lahontan’s work simply assumes as a matter of course that the dialogues are made up, and that the arguments attributed to ‘Adario’ (the name given there to Kandiaronk) are the opinions of Lahontan himself.³¹ In a way, this conclusion is unsurprising. Adario claims not only to have visited France, but expresses opinions on everything from monastic politics to legal affairs. In the debate on religion, he often sounds like an advocate of the deist position that spiritual truth should be sought in reason, not revelation, embracing just the sort of rational scepticism that was becoming popular in Europe’s more daring intellectual circles at the time. It is also true that the style of Lahontan’s dialogues seems partly inspired by the ancient Greek writings of the satirist Lucian; and also that, given the prevalence of Church censorship in France at the time, the easiest way for a freethinker to get away with publishing an open attack on Christianity probably would have been to compose a dialogue pretending to defend the faith from the attacks of an imaginary foreign sceptic – and then make sure one loses all the arguments.

大多数对拉洪丹作品的批评只是理所当然地认为这些对话是编造的，而归于 “阿达里奥”（那里对坎迪阿伦克的称呼）的论点是拉洪丹本人的观点。³¹在某种程度上，这一结论并不令人惊讶。阿达里奥不仅声称自己访问过法国，而且对从寺院政治到法律事务的一切都发表了意见。在关于宗教的辩论中，他听起来常常像是神论者立场的倡导者，即精神上的真理应该在理性而非启示中寻求，他拥抱的正是当时在欧洲更大胆的知识界开始流行的那种理性的怀疑主义。另外，拉洪丹对话的风格似乎部分受到了古希腊讽刺作家卢西恩作品的启发；而且，鉴于当时法国教会审查制度的盛行，一个自由思想家要想摆脱对基督教的公开攻击，最简单的方法可能是撰写一篇对话，假装为信仰辩护，以抵御一个假想的外国怀疑论者的攻击 —— 然后确保自己输掉所有论点。

In recent decades, however, indigenous scholars returned to the material in light of what we know about Kandiaronk himself – and came to very different conclusions.³² The real-life Adario was famous not only for his eloquence, but was known for engaging in debates with Europeans of just the sort recorded in Lahontan’s book. As Barbara Alice Mann remarks, despite the almost unanimous chorus of Western scholars insisting the dialogues are imaginary, ‘there is excellent reason for accepting them as genuine.’ First, there are the first-hand accounts of Kandiaronk’s oratorical skills and dazzling wit. Father Pierre de Charlevoix described Kandiaronk as so ‘naturally eloquent’ that ‘no one perhaps ever exceeded him in mental capacity.’ An exceptional council speaker, ‘he was not less brilliant in conversation in private, and [councilmen and negotiators] often took pleasure in provoking him to hear his repartees, always animated, full of wit, and generally unanswerable. He was the only man in Canada who was a match for the [governor] Count de Frontenac, who often invited him to his table to give his officers this pleasure.’³³

然而，近几十年来，土著学者根据我们对坎迪阿伦克本人的了解，重新研究了这一材料，得出了非常不同的结论。³²现实生活中的阿达里奥不仅以其雄辩而闻名，而且以与欧洲人进行拉洪坦书中所记录的那种辩论而闻名。正如芭芭拉·爱丽丝·曼所说，尽管西方学者几乎一致坚持认为这些对话是虚构的，但 “有很好的理由接受它们是真实的。首先，有关于坎迪阿伦克的演说技巧和令人眼花缭乱的智慧的第一手资料。皮埃尔·德·沙勒沃神父形容坎迪阿隆克是如此 “天生的雄辩家，也许没有人在智力方面超过他”。他是一个出色的议会演讲家，“他在私下里的谈话中也同样出色，议员和谈判代表经常以激怒他为乐，听他的答辩，他总是很活跃，充满机智，而且通常无可辩驳。他是加拿大唯一能与总督弗朗特纳克伯爵相提并论的人，弗朗特纳克伯爵经常邀请他到自己的餐桌上，让他的官员们享受这种乐趣。”³³

During the 1690s, in other words, the Montreal-based governor and his officers (presumably including his sometime deputy, Lahontan) hosted a proto-Enlightenment salon, where they invited Kandiaronk to debate exactly the sort of matters that appeared in the Dialogues, and in which it was Kandiaronk who took the position of rational sceptic.

换句话说，在 1690 年代，蒙特利尔的总督和他的官员（大概包括他的某个副手拉洪丹）举办了一次原启蒙运动沙龙，他们邀请坎迪阿伦克就《对话》中出现的那种问题进行辩论，而在辩论中，正是坎迪阿伦克采取了理性怀疑者的立场。

What’s more, there is every reason to believe that Kandiaronk actually had been to France; that’s to say, we know the Wendat Confederation did send an ambassador to visit the court of Louis XIV in 1691, and Kandiaronk’s office at the time was Speaker of the Council, which would have made him the logical person to send. While the intimate knowledge of European affairs and understanding of European psychology attributed to Adario might seem implausible, Kandiaronk was a man who had been engaged in political negotiations with Europeans for years, and regularly ran circles around them by anticipating their logic, interests, blind spots and reactions. Finally, many of the critiques of Christianity, and European ways more generally, attributed to Adario correspond almost exactly to criticisms that are documented from other speakers of Iroquoian languages around the same time.³⁴

更重要的是，我们完全有理由相信坎迪阿伦克确实去过法国；也就是说，我们知道温达特联邦确实在 1691 年派了一位大使去访问路易十四的宫廷，而坎迪阿伦克当时的职务是议会议长，这将使他成为派去的合理人选。虽然归因于阿达里奥的对欧洲事务的深入了解和对欧洲心理的理解可能看起来难以置信，但坎迪阿伦克是一个多年来一直从事与欧洲人政治谈判的人，他经常通过预测他们的逻辑、利益、盲点和反应来与他们周旋。最后，许多归咎于阿达里奥的对基督教以及更普遍的欧洲方式的批评，几乎与同一时期其他讲伊鲁瓦语的人所记录的批评完全一致。³⁴

Lahontan himself claimed to have based the Dialogues on notes jotted down during or after a variety of conversations he’d had with Kandiaronk at Michilimackinac, on the strait between Lakes Huron and Michigan; notes that he later reorganized with the governor’s help and which were supplemented, no doubt, by reminiscences both had of similar debates held over Frontenac’s own dinner table. In the process the text was no doubt augmented and embellished, and probably tweaked again when Lahontan produced his final edition in Amsterdam. There is, however, every reason to believe the basic arguments were Kandiaronk’s own.

拉洪丹本人声称，他是根据在休伦湖和密歇根湖之间的密西里马基纳克与坎迪亚龙克进行的各种《对话》期间或之后记下的笔记编写的；他后来在州长的帮助下重新整理了这些笔记，毫无疑问，这些笔记还得到了两人对在弗朗特纳克的餐桌上进行的类似辩论的回忆的补充。在这个过程中，文本无疑得到了扩充和润色，而且当拉洪丹在阿姆斯特丹出版其最终版本时，可能又进行了调整。然而，我们完全有理由相信，基本论点是坎迪阿伦克自己的。

Lahontan anticipates some of these arguments in his Memoirs, when he notes that Americans who had actually been to Europe – here, he was very likely thinking primarily of Kandiaronk himself, as well as a number of former captives who had been put to work as galley slaves – came back contemptuous of European claims to cultural superiority. Those Native Americans who had been in France, he wrote,

拉洪坦在他的《回忆录》中预见到了其中的一些论点，他指出，真正去过欧洲的美洲人 —— 在这里，他很可能主要想到的是坎迪阿伦克本人，以及一些曾被当作船队奴隶的前俘虏 —— 回来后对欧洲人声称的文化优越性感到轻蔑。他写道，那些曾经在法国的美洲原住民。

… were continually teasing us with the faults and disorders they observed in our towns, as being occasioned by money. There’s no point in trying to remonstrate with them about how useful the distinction of property is for the support of society: they make a joke of anything you say on that account. In short, they neither quarrel nor fight, nor slander one another; they scoff at arts and sciences, and laugh at the difference of ranks which is observed with us. They brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having, alleging that we degrade ourselves in subjecting ourselves to one man [the king] who possesses all the power, and is bound by no law but his own will.

…… 他们不断地嘲笑我们，说他们在我们的城镇中观察到的缺点和混乱是由金钱造成的。试图提醒他们财产的区别对社会的支持有多大作用是没有意义的：他们会把你在这方面说的话当作笑话。简而言之，他们既不争吵，也不打架，也不互相诽谤；他们嘲笑艺术和科学，嘲笑我们所看到的等级差异。他们给我们打上奴隶的烙印，称我们是可悲的灵魂，他们的生命不值得拥有，声称我们屈从于一个拥有所有权力的人国王，不受任何法律约束，只受他自己意愿的约束，这使我们感到自卑。

In other words, we find here all the familiar criticisms of European society that the earliest missionaries had to contend with – the squabbling, the lack of mutual aid, the blind submission to authority – but with a new element added in: the organization of private property. Lahontan continues: ‘They think it unaccountable that one man should have more than another, and that the rich should have more respect than the poor. In short, they say, the name of savages, which we bestow upon them, would fit ourselves better, since there is nothing in our actions that bears an appearance of wisdom.’

换句话说，我们在这里发现了最早的传教士不得不面对的对欧洲社会的所有熟悉的批评 —— 争吵、缺乏互助、盲目服从权威 —— 但又加入了一个新元素：私有财产的组织。拉洪坦继续说。“他们认为，一个人比另一个人拥有更多，富人比穷人更受尊重，这是无法解释的。简而言之，他们说，我们赋予他们的野蛮人之名，更适合我们自己，因为我们的行为没有任何智慧的影子。”

Native Americans who had the opportunity to observe French society from up close had come to realize one key difference from their own, one which may not otherwise have been apparent. Whereas in their own societies there was no obvious way to convert wealth into power over others (with the consequence that differences of wealth had little effect on individual freedom), in France the situation could not have been more different. Power over possessions could be directly translated into power over other human beings.

有机会近距离观察法国社会的美洲原住民已经意识到与他们自己社会的一个关键区别，这个区别在其他情况下可能并不明显。在他们自己的社会中，没有明显的方法将财富转化为对他人的权力（其结果是财富的差异对个人自由没有什么影响），而在法国，情况就完全不同了。对财产的权力可以直接转化为对其他人类的权力。

But here let us give the floor to Kandiaronk himself. The first of the Dialogues is about religious matters, in which Lahontan allows his foil calmly to pick apart the logical contradictions and incoherence of the Christian doctrines of original sin and redemption, paying particular attention to the concept of hell. As well as casting doubt on the historicity of scripture, Kandiaronk continually emphasizes the fact that Christians are divided into endless sects, each convinced they are entirely right and that all the others are hell-bound. To give a sense of its flavour:

但在这里，让我们把发言权交给坎迪阿伦克本人。《对话》的第一篇是关于宗教问题的，在这篇对话中，拉洪坦让他的陪衬冷静地挑出逻辑上的矛盾和不连贯之处， 基督教的原罪和救赎学说，特别注意地狱的概念。除了对圣经的历史性表示怀疑外，坎迪阿伦克还不断强调，基督教徒被分成无穷无尽的教派，每个教派都坚信自己是完全正确的，而其他教派都是下地狱的。让我们来感受一下它的味道：

Kandiaronk: Come on, my brother. Don’t get up in arms … It’s only natural for Christians to have faith in the holy scriptures, since, from their infancy, they’ve heard so much of them. Still, it is nothing if not reasonable for those born without such prejudice, such as the Wendats, to examine matters more closely.

坎迪阿伦克：来吧，我的兄弟。不要起哄…… 基督徒对神圣的经文有信心是很自然的，因为从他们的婴儿期开始，他们就听到了很多关于经文的内容。不过，对于那些生来就没有这种偏见的人，如温达特人，更仔细地研究问题，也是无可厚非的。

However, having thought long and hard over the course of a decade about what the Jesuits have told us of the life and death of the son of the Great Spirit, any Wendat could give you twenty reasons against the notion. For myself, I’ve always held that, if it were possible that God had lowered his standards sufficiently to come down to earth, he would have done it in full view of everyone, descending in triumph, with pomp and majesty, and most publicly … He would have gone from nation to nation performing mighty miracles, thus giving everyone the same laws. Then we would all have had exactly the same religion, uniformly spread and equally known throughout the four corners of the world, proving to our descendants, from then till ten thousand years into the future, the truth of this religion. Instead, there are five or six hundred religions, each distinct from the other, of which according to you, the religion of the French, alone, is any good, sainted, or true.³⁵

然而，经过十年来对耶稣会士告诉我们的大神之子的生与死的长时间思考，任何一个温达特人都可以给你二十条理由来反对这种观念。就我自己而言，我一直认为，如果上帝有可能充分降低他的标准下凡，他就会在所有人的注视下这样做，凯旋而降，以最公开的方式进行…… 他将从一个国家走到另一个国家，创造强大的奇迹，从而给每个人同样的法律。然后，我们都会有完全相同的宗教，在世界的四面八方统一传播，同样为人所知，向我们的后代证明，从那时到未来的一万年，这个宗教的真理。相反，现在有五六百种宗教，每一种都与其他宗教不同，按照你的说法，其中只有法国人的宗教是好的、圣洁的或真实的。³⁵

The last passage reflects perhaps Kandiaronk’s most telling point: the extraordinary self-importance of the Jesuit conviction that an all-knowing and all-powerful being would freely choose to entrap himself in flesh and undergo terrible suffering, all for the sake of a single species, designed to be imperfect, only some of which were going to be rescued from damnation anyway.³⁶

最后一段话也许反映了坎迪阿伦克最有说服力的观点：耶稣会的信念是非常自我的，一个全知全能的存在会自由地选择把自己困在肉体中，经历可怕的痛苦，这一切都是为了一个单一的物种，被设计成不完美的，反正其中只有一些会被从诅咒中拯救出来。³⁶

There follows a chapter on the subject of law, where Kandiaronk takes the position that European-style punitive law, like the religious doctrine of eternal damnation, is not necessitated by any inherent corruption of human nature, but rather by a form of social organization that encourages selfish and acquisitive behaviour. Lahontan objects: true, reason is the same for all humans, but the very existence of judges and punishment shows that not everyone is capable of following its dictates:

接下来有一章是关于法律的主题，坎迪阿伦克的立场是，欧洲式的惩罚性法律，就像宗教的永恒诅咒学说一样，并不是因为人类本性的任何内在腐败而必需的，而是因为一种鼓励自私和获取性行为的社会组织形式。拉洪坦反对：的确，理性对所有人类都是一样的，但法官和惩罚的存在本身就表明，不是每个人都能遵循它的指令：

Lahontan : This is why the wicked need to be punished, and the good need to be rewarded. Otherwise, murder, robbery and defamation would spread everywhere, and, in a word, we would become the most miserable people upon the face of the earth.

拉洪坦: 这就是为什么邪恶的人需要被惩罚，而善良的人需要被奖励。否则，谋杀、抢劫和诽谤将到处蔓延，总之，我们将成为地球上最悲惨的人。

Kandiaronk : For my own part, I find it hard to see how you could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment?…

坎迪阿伦克：就我个人而言，我很难看出你怎么会比你现在更悲惨。欧洲人必须是什么样的人，什么样的生物，以至于他们必须被迫行善，而只是因为害怕惩罚而不作恶？

You have observed that we lack judges. What is the reason for that? Well, we never bring lawsuits against one another. And why do we never bring lawsuits? Well, because we made a decision neither to accept or make use of money. And why do we refuse to allow money into our communities? The reason is this: we are determined not to have laws – because, since the world was a world, our ancestors have been able to live contentedly without them.

你已经观察到我们缺乏法官。那是什么原因呢？嗯，我们从来没有对彼此提起过诉讼。为什么我们从不打官司呢？嗯，因为我们做了一个决定，既不接受也不使用金钱。那为什么我们拒绝让金钱进入我们的社区呢？原因是这样的：我们决心不拥有法律 —— 因为，自从世界是一个世界以来，我们的祖先就能够在没有法律的情况下满足地生活。

Given that the Wendat most certainly did have a legal code, this might seem disingenuous on Kandiaronk’s part. By laws, however, he is clearly referring to laws of a coercive or punitive nature. He goes on to dissect the failings of the French legal system, dwelling particularly on judicial persecution, false testimony, torture, witchcraft accusations and differential justice for rich and poor. In conclusion, he swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:

鉴于温达特人肯定有一部法律法典，这在坎迪阿伦克看来可能是不真诚的。然而，他所说的法律显然是指具有强制或惩罚性质的法律。他继续剖析了法国法律体系的缺陷，特别强调了司法迫害、假证、酷刑、巫术指控和贫富不均的司法。最后，他又回到了他最初的观察：如果法国没有同时维持一个鼓励人们做坏事的相反的机器，那么试图强迫人们表现得好的整个机器是不必要的。这个装置包括金钱、产权和由此产生的对物质自我利益的追求：

Kandiaronk: I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, – of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?

坎迪阿伦克：我花了六年时间反思欧洲社会的状况，我仍然想不出他们有哪种行为方式不是不人道的，我真心认为这只能是事实，只要你坚持你的 “我的” 和 “你的” 区分。我申明，你们所说的钱是魔鬼中的魔鬼；是法国人的暴君，是所有罪恶的源头；是灵魂的祸害和活人的屠宰场。想象一个人可以生活在金钱的国度里而保存自己的灵魂，就像想象一个人可以在湖底保存自己的生命。金钱是奢侈、淫乱、阴谋、诡计、谎言、背叛、不真诚的父亲，是世界上所有最坏的行为的父亲。父亲卖掉他们的孩子，丈夫卖掉他们的妻子，妻子背叛他们的丈夫，兄弟之间互相残杀，朋友之间虚情假意，而这一切都是因为钱。鉴于这一切，请告诉我，我们温达特人拒绝接触，甚至不看银器，是不对的？

For Europeans in 1703, this was heady stuff.

对于 1703 年的欧洲人来说，这是令人振奋的事情。

Much of the subsequent exchange consists of the Frenchman trying to convince Kandiaronk of the advantages of adopting European civilization, and Kandiaronk countering that the French would do much better to adopt the Wendat way of life. Do you seriously imagine, he says, that I would be happy to live like one of the inhabitants of Paris, to take two hours every morning just to put on my shirt and make-up, to bow and scrape before every obnoxious galoot I meet on the street who happened to have been born with an inheritance? Do you really imagine I could carry a purse full of coins and not immediately hand them over to people who are hungry; that I would carry a sword but not immediately draw it on the first band of thugs I see rounding up the destitute to press them into naval service? If, on the other hand, Lahontan were to adopt an American way of life, Kandiaronk tells him, it might take a while to adjust – but in the end he’d be far happier. (Kandiaronk had a point, as we’ve seen in the last chapter; settlers adopted into indigenous societies almost never wanted to go back.)

随后的交流中，法国人试图说服坎迪阿伦克采用欧洲文明的好处，而坎迪阿伦克则反驳说法国人最好采用温达特的生活方式。他说，你真的想象我很乐意像巴黎的居民一样生活，每天早上花两个小时穿上衬衫和化妆，在街上遇到的每一个碰巧有遗产的讨厌的乡巴佬面前鞠躬道歉？你真的认为我可以带着满满一钱包的硬币，而不立即把它们交给饥饿的人；我可以带着一把剑，而不立即拔出它来对付我看到的第一群围捕赤贫者以迫使他们加入海军的暴徒？另一方面，如果拉洪坦采用美洲的生活方式，坎迪阿伦克告诉他，可能需要一段时间来适应 —— 但最终他会更快乐。（正如我们在上一章中所看到的，坎迪阿伦克说得很有道理；被纳入土著社会的定居者几乎从未想过要回去。）

Kandiaronk is even willing to propose that Europe would be better off if its whole social system was dismantled:

坎迪阿伦克甚至愿意提出，如果欧洲的整个社会体系被拆除，它将会变得更好。

Lahontan: Try for once in your life to actually listen. Can’t you see, my dear friend, that the nations of Europe could not survive without gold and silver – or some similar precious symbol. Without it, nobles, priests, merchants and any number of others who lack the strength to work the soil would simply die of hunger. Our kings would not be kings; what soldiers would we have? Who would work for kings, or anybody else?… It would plunge Europe into chaos and create the most dismal confusion imaginable.

拉洪坦：试着在你的生活中真正听一次。亲爱的朋友，你难道看不出来，如果没有金银 —— 或一些类似的珍贵符号，欧洲的国家就无法生存。没有它，贵族、牧师、商人和任何其他缺乏力量耕种土地的人都会直接饿死。我们的国王不会成为国王；我们会有什么士兵？谁会为国王或其他任何人工作 ？…… 这将使欧洲陷入混乱，并造成可以想象的最令人沮丧的混乱。

Kandiaronk: You honestly think you’re going to sway me by appealing to the needs of nobles, merchants and priests? If you abandoned conceptions of mine and thine, yes, such distinctions between men would dissolve; a levelling equality would then take its place among you as it now does among the Wendat. And yes, for the first thirty years after the banishing of self-interest, no doubt you would indeed see a certain desolation as those who are only qualified to eat, drink, sleep and take pleasure would languish and die. But their progeny would be fit for our way of living. Over and over I have set forth the qualities that we Wendat believe ought to define humanity – wisdom, reason, equity, etc. – and demonstrated that the existence of separate material interests knocks all these on the head. A man motivated by interest cannot be a man of reason.

坎迪阿伦克：你真的认为你会通过呼吁贵族、商人和牧师的需求来动摇我？如果你放弃了我的和你的概念，是的，人与人之间的这种区别就会消失；然后，一种平坦的平等就会在你们中间取代，就像现在在温达特人中间一样。是的，在放逐自我利益之后的头三十年，毫无疑问，你们确实会看到某种荒凉，因为那些只有资格吃喝拉撒的人将会痛苦地死去。但他们的后代会适合我们的生活方式。我一遍又一遍地阐述了我们温达特人认为应该定义人类的品质 —— 智慧、理性、公平等等 —— 并证明了独立的物质利益的存在使所有这些都落空了。一个受利益驱使的人不可能成为一个有理性的人。

Here, finally, ‘equality’ is invoked as a self-conscious ideal – but only as the result of a prolonged confrontation between American and European institutions and values, and as a calculated provocation, turning European civilizing discourse backwards on itself.

在这里，“平等” 终于被援引为一种自觉的理想 —— 但只是作为美洲和欧洲机构和价值观之间长期对抗的结果，以及作为一种精心策划的挑衅，将欧洲的文明话语反过来指向自己。

One reason why modern commentators have found it so easy to dismiss Kandiaronk as the ultimate ‘noble savage’ (and, therefore, as a mere projection of European fantasies) is because many of his assertions are so obviously exaggerated. It’s not really true that the Wendat, or other American societies, had no laws, never quarrelled and knew no inequalities of wealth. At the same time, as we’ve seen, Kandiaronk’s basic line of argument is perfectly consistent with what French missionaries and settlers in North America had been hearing from other indigenous Americans. To argue that because the Dialogues romanticize, they can’t really reflect what he said, is to assume that people are incapable of romanticizing themselves – despite the fact that this is what any skilful debater is likely to do under such circumstances, and all sources concur that Kandiaronk was perhaps the most skilful they’d ever met.

现代评论员之所以发现很容易将坎迪阿伦克作为最终的 “高贵的野蛮人”（因此，仅仅是欧洲人幻想的投射）而加以否定，原因之一是他的许多论断显然是夸大其词。温达特人或其他美洲社会没有法律，从不争吵，不知道财富的不平等，这并不是真的。同时，正如我们所看到的，坎迪阿伦克的基本论点与北美的法国传教士和定居者从其他美洲原住民那里听到的内容完全一致。如果说因为《对话》是浪漫的，所以不能真正反映他所说的内容，那就是假设人们无法将自己浪漫化 —— 尽管在这种情况下，任何有技巧的辩论者都有可能这样做，而且所有消息来源都认为坎迪阿伦克也许是他们所见过的最有技巧的。

Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term ‘schismogenesis’ to describe people’s tendency to define themselves against one another.³⁷ Imagine two people getting into an argument about some minor political disagreement but, after an hour, ending up taking positions so intransigent that they find themselves on completely opposite sides of some ideological divide – even taking extreme positions they would never embrace under ordinary circumstances, just to show how much they completely reject the other’s points. They start out as moderate social democrats of slightly different flavours; before a few heated hours are over, one has somehow become a Leninist, the other an advocate of the ideas of Milton Friedman. We know this kind of thing can happen in arguments. Bateson suggested such processes can become institutionalized on a cultural level as well. How, he asked, do boys and girls in Papua New Guinea come to behave so differently, despite the fact that no one ever explicitly instructs them about how boys and girls are supposed to behave? It’s not just by imitating their elders; it’s also because boys and girls each learn to find the behaviour of the opposite sex distasteful and try to be as little like them as possible. What start as minor learned differences become exaggerated until women come to think of themselves as, and then increasingly actually become, everything that men are not. And, of course, men do the same thing towards women.

早在 20 世纪 30 年代，人类学家格雷戈里·贝特森（Gregory Bateson）就创造了 “分裂生成” 这一术语，以描述人们将自己定义为，彼此对立的倾向。³⁷想象一下，两个人因为一些小的政治分歧而发生争论，但在一个小时后，最终采取了如此顽固的立场，以至于他们发现自己处于一些意识形态分歧的完全对立面 —— 甚至采取他们在普通情况下绝不会接受的极端立场，只是为了显示他们完全拒绝对方的观点。他们一开始是口味稍有不同的温和的社会民主党人；在几个激烈的小时结束之前，一个人就莫名其妙地变成了列宁主义者，另一个则是米尔顿·弗里德曼思想的拥护者。我们知道这种事情会在争论中发生。贝特森认为这种过程在文化层面上也会变得制度化。他问道，在巴布亚新几内亚，尽管没有人明确指示他们男孩和女孩应该如何行事，但男孩和女孩的行为是如何变得如此不同的？这不仅仅是通过模仿他们的长辈；还因为男孩和女孩都学会了发现异性的行为令人厌恶，并试图尽可能地不像他们。开始时只是一些微小的学习差异，后来被夸大了，直到女性开始认为自己是，然后越来越多地成为男性所不具备的一切。当然，男人也会对女人做同样的事情。

Bateson was interested in psychological processes within societies, but there’s every reason to believe something similar happens between societies as well. People come to define themselves against their neighbours. Urbanites thus become more urbane, as barbarians become more barbarous. If ‘national character’ can really be said to exist, it can only be as a result of such schismogenetic processes: English people trying to become as little as possible like French, French people as little like Germans, and so on. If nothing else, they will all definitely exaggerate their differences in arguing with one another.

贝特森对社会内部的心理过程感兴趣，但完全有理由相信社会之间也会发生类似的事情。人们会对照他们的邻居来定义自己。城市人因此变得更加城市化，而野蛮人则变得更加野蛮。如果 “民族性格” 真的可以说是存在的，那也只能是这种分裂过程的结果。英国人试图尽可能少地变得像法国人，法国人尽可能少地像德国人，诸如此类。如果不出意外的话，他们在相互争论时肯定都会夸大自己的差异。

In a historical confrontation of civilizations like that taking place along the east coast of North America in the seventeenth century, we can expect to see two contradictory processes. On the one hand, it is only to be expected that people on both sides of the divide will learn from one another and adopt each other’s ideas, habits and technologies (Americans began using European muskets; European settlers began to adopt more indulgent American approaches to disciplining children). At the same time, they will also almost invariably do the opposite, picking out certain points of contrast and exaggerating or idealizing them – eventually even trying to act, in some respects, as little like their new neighbours as possible.

在像十七世纪发生在北美东海岸的历史性文明对抗中，我们可以预期会看到两个矛盾的过程。一方面，可以预料的是，鸿沟两边的人们会相互学习，并采用对方的想法、习惯和技术（美洲人开始使用欧洲的火枪；欧洲定居者开始采用更放纵的美洲人的方法来管教孩子）。 同时，他们也会几乎无一例外地做相反的事情，挑选出某些对比点，并将其夸大或理想化 —— 最终甚至试图在某些方面尽可能地不像他们的新邻居。

Kandiaronk’s focus on money is typical of such situations. To this day, indigenous societies incorporated into the global economy, from Bolivia to Taiwan, almost invariably frame their own traditions, as Marshall Sahlins puts it, by opposition to the white man’s ‘living in the way of money’.³⁸

坎迪阿伦克对金钱的关注是这种情况的典型。时至今日，从玻利维亚到台湾，被纳入全球经济的原住民社会，几乎无一例外地以反对白人 “以钱为生” 的方式来框定自己的传统，正如马歇尔·萨林斯所说的那样。³⁸

All these would be rather trivial concerns had Lahontan’s books not been so successful; but they were to have an enormous impact on European sensibilities. Kandiaronk’s opinions were translated into German, English, Dutch and Italian, and continued in print, in multiple editions, for over a century. Any self-respecting intellectual of the eighteenth century would have been almost certain to have read them. They also inspired a flood of imitations. By 1721, Parisian theatregoers were flocking to Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’.³⁹ The play was revived almost yearly for the next two decades.⁴⁰

如果拉洪坦的书不是如此成功，所有这些都是相当微不足道的关注；但它们对欧洲人的感觉产生了巨大的影响。坎迪阿伦克的观点被翻译成德语、英语、荷兰语和意大利语，并以多种版本继续印刷了一个多世纪。十八世纪任何有自尊心的知识分子几乎都会读过这些文章。它们还激发了大量的模仿作品。到 1721 年，巴黎的戏迷们蜂拥而至，观看德莱尔·德雷维埃的喜剧《野蛮的哈雷克》，它讲述了一个被年轻船长带到法国的温达特人的故事，其中有一长串愤怒的独白，主人公 “将法国社会的弊病归咎于私有财产、金钱，尤其是使穷人成为富人奴隶的可怕的不平等”。³⁹在接下来的二十年里，该剧几乎每年都会重演。⁴⁰

Even more strikingly, just about every major French Enlightenment figure tried their hand at a Lahontan-style critique of their own society, from the perspective of some imagined outsider. Montesquieu chose a Persian; the Marquis d’Argens a Chinese; Diderot a Tahitian; Chateaubriand a Natchez; Voltaire’s L’Ingénu was half Wendat and half French.⁴¹ All took up and developed themes and arguments borrowed directly from Kandiaronk, supplemented by lines from other ‘savage critics’ in travellers’ accounts.⁴² Indeed, a strong case can be made for the real origins of the ‘Western gaze’ – that rational, supposedly objective way of looking at strange and exotic cultures which came to characterize later European anthropology – lying not in travellers’ accounts, but rather in European accounts of precisely these imaginary sceptical natives: gazing inwards, brows furrowed, at the exotic curiosities of Europe itself.

更令人震惊的是，几乎每一个法国启蒙运动的主要人物都试图从一些想象中的外来者的角度对他们自己的社会进行拉洪坦式的批判。孟德斯鸠选择了一个波斯人；阿尔根斯侯爵选择了一个中国人；狄德罗选择了一个塔希提人；夏多布里昂选择了一个纳奇兹人；伏尔泰的《英格努》有一半是温达特人，一半是法国人。⁴¹所有的人都接受并发展了直接从坎迪阿伦克那里借来的主题和论点，并辅以旅行者叙述中其他 “野蛮人批评家” 的句子。⁴²事实上，有一个强有力的理由可以证明 “西方目光” 的真正起源 —— 这种理性的、所谓客观的看待陌生和异国文化的方式，成为后来欧洲人类学的特点 —— 不在于旅行者的描述，而在于欧洲人对这些想象中的怀疑论者的描述：向内凝视，眉头紧皱，看着欧洲本身的异国情调。

Perhaps the single most popular work of this genre, published in 1747, was Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary kidnapped Inca princess. The book is considered a feminist landmark, in that it may well be the first European novel about a woman which does not end with the protagonist either marrying or dying. Graffigny’s Inca heroine, Zilia, is as critical of the vanities and absurdities of European society as she is of patriarchy. By the nineteenth century, the novel was remembered in some quarters as the first work to introduce the notion of state socialism to the general public, Zilia wondering why the French king, despite levying all sorts of heavy taxes, cannot simply redistribute the wealth in the same manner as the Sapa Inca.⁴³

也许这类作品中最受欢迎的是著名沙龙作家格拉菲尼夫人在 1747 年出版的《一个秘鲁女人的信》，该书通过一个想象中的被绑架的印加公主的眼睛观察法国社会。这本书被认为是一个女权主义的里程碑，因为它很可能是欧洲第一部关于女性的小说，其结局不是以主人公结婚就是死亡而告终。格拉菲尼的印加女主人公齐莉娅对欧洲社会的虚荣和荒唐进行了批判，就像她对父权制的批判一样。到了十九世纪，这部小说在某些方面被认为是向大众介绍国家社会主义概念的第一部作品，齐莉亚想知道为什么法国国王尽管征收了各种重税，却不能像萨帕印加人那样简单地重新分配财富。⁴³

In 1751, preparing a second edition of her book, Madame de Graffigny sent letters to a variety of friends asking for suggested changes. One of these correspondents was a twenty-three-year-old seminary student and budding economist, A. R. J. Turgot, and we happen to have a copy of his reply – which was long and highly (if constructively) critical. Turgot’s text could hardly be more important, since it marks a key moment in his own intellectual development: the point where he began to turn his most lasting contribution to human thought – the idea of material economic progress – into a general theory of history.

1751 年，德·格拉菲尼夫人在准备她的书的第二版时，给许多朋友写信，征求他们的修改意见。其中一位是 23 岁的神学院学生和新晋经济学家杜尔哥，我们碰巧有一份他的回信 —— 很长，而且是高度（如果是建设性的）批评。杜尔哥的文章再重要不过了，因为它标志着他自己思想发展的一个关键时刻：他开始把他对人类思想最持久的贡献 —— 物质经济进步的思想 —— 变成一种一般的历史理论。

IN WHICH WE EXPLAIN THE DEMIURGIC POWERS OF A. R. J. TURGOT, AND HOW HE TURNED THE INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION ON ITS HEAD, LAYING THE BASIS FOR MOST MODERN VIEWS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION (OR: HOW AN ARGUMENT ABOUT ‘FREEDOM’ BECAME ONE ABOUT ‘EQUALITY’)

其中，我们解释了杜尔哥的恶魔般的力量，以及他如何颠覆了欧洲文明的本土批判，为大多数现代社会进化观点奠定了基础（或者：关于 “自由” 的争论如何成为关于 “平等” 的争论）。

The Inca Empire could hardly be described as ‘egalitarian’ – indeed, it was an empire – but Madame de Graffigny represented it as a benevolent despotism; one in which all are ultimately equal before the king. Zilia’s critique of France, like that of all imaginary outsiders writing in the tradition of Kandiaronk, focuses on the lack of individual freedom in French society and its violent inequalities.⁴⁴ But Turgot found such thinking disturbing, even dangerous.

印加帝国很难被描述为 “平等主义” —— 事实上，它是一个帝国 —— 但德·格拉菲尼夫人把它表现为一个仁慈的专制主义；一个在国王面前最终人人平等的帝国。 齐利亚对法国的批评，就像所有按照坎迪阿伦克的传统写作的假想外来者一样，集中在法国社会缺乏个人自由和暴力的不平等。⁴⁴但杜尔哥认为这种思想令人不安，甚至是危险的。

Yes, Turgot acknowledged, ‘we all love the idea of freedom and equality’ – in principle. But we must consider a larger context. In reality, he ventured, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority; it’s a sign of inferiority, since it is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient and, therefore, where everyone is equally poor. As societies evolve, Turgot reasoned, technology advances. Natural differences in talents and capacities between individuals (which have always existed) become more significant, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labour. We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex ‘commercial civilization’, in which the poverty and dispossession of some – however lamentable it may be – is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole.

是的，杜尔哥承认，“我们都喜欢自由和平等的理念” —— 在原则上。但我们必须考虑一个更大的背景。他大胆地说，在现实中，野蛮人的自由和平等并不是他们优越的标志；而是劣等的标志，因为只有在一个每个家庭基本自给自足，因此每个人都同样贫穷的社会中才有可能。杜尔哥推断，随着社会的发展，技术也在不断进步。个人之间的天赋和能力的差异（一直存在）变得更加重要，最终它们形成了越来越复杂的劳动分工的基础。我们从温达特人那样的简单社会发展到我们自己的复杂的 “商业文明”，其中一些人的贫困和被剥夺 —— 无论多么可悲 —— 仍然是整个社会繁荣的必要条件。

There is no avoiding such inequality, concluded Turgot in his reply to Madame de Graffigny. The only alternative, according to him, would be massive, Inca-style state intervention to create a uniformity of social conditions: an enforced equality which could only have the effect of crushing all initiative and, therefore, result in economic and social catastrophe. In light of all this, Turgot suggested Madame de Graffigny rewrite her novel in such a way as to have Zilia realize these terrible implications at the end of the book.

杜尔哥在给格拉菲尼夫人的答复中总结说，这种不平等是无法避免的。他认为，唯一的选择是进行大规模的、印加式的国家干预，以创造统一的社会条件：这种强制的平等只能产生压制所有主动性的效果，因此会导致经济和社会灾难的发生。有鉴于此，杜尔哥建议德·格拉菲尼夫人重写她的小说，让齐利亚在书的结尾处意识到这些可怕的影响。

Unsurprisingly, Graffigny ignored his advice.

不出所料，格拉菲尼没有理会他的建议。

A few years later, Turgot would elaborate these same ideas in a series of lectures on world history. He had already been arguing – for some years – for the primacy of technological progress as a driver for overall social improvement. In these lectures, he developed this argument into an explicit theory of stages of economic development: social evolution, he reasoned, always begins with hunters, then moves on to a stage of pastoralism, then farming, and only then finally passes to the contemporary stage of urban commercial civilization.⁴⁵ Those who still remain hunters, shepherds or simple farmers are best understood as vestiges of our own previous stages of social development.

几年后，杜尔哥在一系列关于世界历史的演讲中阐述了这些相同的观点。几年来，他一直在论证技术进步作为整体社会改善的动力的首要地位。在这些讲座中，他将这一论点发展为明确的经济发展阶段理论：他认为，社会进化总是从猎人开始，然后进入牧业阶段，然后是农耕，最后才进入当代的城市商业文明阶段。⁴⁵那些仍然是猎人、牧人或简单农民的人最好被理解为我们自己以前社会发展阶段的残余。

In this way, theories of social evolution – now so familiar that we rarely dwell on their origins – first came to be articulated in Europe: as a direct response to the power of indigenous critique. Within a few years, Turgot’s breakdown of all societies into four stages was appearing in the lectures of his friend and intellectual ally Adam Smith in Glasgow, and was worked into a general theory of human history by Smith’s colleagues: men like Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson and John Millar. The new paradigm soon began to have a profound effect on how indigenous people were imagined by European thinkers, and by the European public more generally.

以这种方式，社会进化理论 —— 现在是如此熟悉，以至于我们很少纠结于它们的起源 —— 首先在欧洲得到阐述：作为对本土批判力量的直接回应。几年之内，杜尔哥将所有社会划分为四个阶段的观点出现在他的朋友和知识界盟友亚当·斯密在格拉斯哥的演讲中，并被斯密的同事：如卡姆斯勋爵、亚当·弗格森和约翰·米勒等人纳入人类历史的一般理论。这种新的范式很快就开始对欧洲思想家和欧洲公众对土著人的想象产生了深远的影响。

Observers who had previously considered the modes of subsistence and division of labour in North American societies to be trivial matters, or of at best secondary importance, now began assuming that they were the only thing that really mattered. Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of acquiring food. ‘Egalitarian’ societies were banished to the bottom of this ladder, where at best they could provide some insight on how our distant ancestors might have lived; but certainly could no longer be imagined as equal parties to a dialogue about how the inhabitants of wealthy and powerful societies should conduct themselves in the present.

以前认为北美社会的生存方式和劳动分工是微不足道的事情，或者充其量是次要的，现在开始认为它们是唯一真正重要的事情。每个人都将根据他们获取食物的主要方式，在同一个宏伟的进化阶梯上被分类。“平等主义” 社会被放逐到这个阶梯的底部，在那里他们最多只能提供一些关于我们遥远的祖先如何生活的见解；但肯定不能再被想象为关于富裕和强大社会的居民在现在应该如何行事的对话中的平等方。

Let’s pause for a moment to take stock. In the years between 1703 and 1751, as we’ve seen, the indigenous American critique of European society had an enormous impact on European thought. What began as widespread expressions of outrage and distaste by Americans (when first exposed to European mores) eventually evolved, through a thousand conversations, conducted in dozens of languages from Portuguese to Russian, into an argument about the nature of authority, decency, social responsibility and, above all, freedom. As it became clear to French observers that most indigenous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values – organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another, and hence viewing French society as essentially one of fractious slaves – they reacted in a variety of different ways.

让我们停顿片刻，总结一下。正如我们所看到的，在 1703 年至 1751 年期间，美洲本土对欧洲社会的批评对欧洲思想产生了巨大影响。起初，美洲人（在第一次接触欧洲的风俗习惯时）普遍表达了愤怒和厌恶，通过用从葡萄牙语到俄语等几十种语言进行的无数次对话，最终演变成一场关于权威、体面、社会责任以及最重要的自由性质的辩论。法国观察家们清楚地认识到，大多数美洲土著人将个人自主和行动自由视为完美的价值观 —— 以这样一种方式组织他们自己的生活，以尽量减少一个人服从另一个人的意志的可能性，因此将法国社会视为本质上是一个分裂的奴隶社会 —— 他们以各种不同的方式作出反应。

Some, like the Jesuits, condemned the principle of freedom outright. Others – settlers, intellectuals and members of the reading public back home – came to see it as a provocative and appealing social proposition. (Their conclusions on this matter, incidentally, bore no particular relation to their feelings about indigenous populations themselves, whom they were often happy to see exterminated – though, in fairness, there were public figures on both sides of the intellectual divide who strongly opposed aggression against foreign peoples.) In fact, the indigenous critique of European institutions was seen as so powerful that anyone objecting to existing intellectual and social arrangements would tend to deploy it as a weapon of choice: a game, as we’ve seen, played by pretty much every one of the great Enlightenment philosophers.

一些人，如耶稣会，直接谴责自由原则。另一些人 —— 定居者、知识分子和家乡的读书人 —— 则将其视为一个具有挑衅性和吸引力的社会主张。（顺带一提，他们在这个问题上的结论与他们对原住民的感受没有特别的关系，他们往往乐于看到原住民被灭绝 —— 尽管公平地说，知识界的两派都有公众人物强烈反对侵略外国人民。）事实上，对欧洲机构的本土批判被认为是如此强大，以至于任何反对现有知识和社会安排的人都倾向于将其作为首选武器来使用：正如我们所看到的，几乎每一位伟大的启蒙哲学家都在玩这个游戏。

In the process – and we’ve seen how this was already happening with Lahontan and Kandiaronk – an argument about freedom also became, increasingly, an argument about equality. Above all, though, all these appeals to the wisdom of ‘savages’ were still ways of challenging the arrogance of received authority: that medieval certainty which maintained that the judgments of the Church and the establishment it upheld, having embraced the correct version of Christianity, were necessarily superior to those of anyone else on earth.

在这个过程中 —— 我们已经看到这在拉洪坦和坎迪阿伦克身上发生的情况 —— 关于自由的争论也越来越成为关于平等的争论。但最重要的是，所有这些对 “野蛮人” 智慧的呼吁仍然是挑战公认权威的傲慢的方式：那种中世纪的确定性，它坚持认为教会的判断和它所维护的机构，在接受了正确的基督教版本后，必然比地球上的任何人都要优越。

Turgot’s case reveals just how much those particular notions of civilization, evolution and progress – which we’ve come to think of as the very core of Enlightenment thought – are, in fact, relative latecomers to that critical tradition. Most importantly, it shows how the development of these notions came in direct response to the power of the indigenous critique. Indeed, it was to take an enormous effort to salvage that very sense of European superiority which Enlightenment thinkers had aimed to upend, unsettle and de-centre. Certainly, over the next century and more, such ideas became a remarkably successful strategy for doing so. But they also created a welter of contradictions: for instance, the peculiar fact that European colonial empires, unlike almost any other in history, were forced to espouse their own ephemerality, claiming to be mere temporary vehicles to speed up their subjects’ march to civilization – at least those subjects who, unlike the Wendat, they hadn’t largely wiped off the map.

杜尔哥的案例揭示了那些特殊的文明、进化和进步的概念 —— 我们已经认为是启蒙思想的核心 —— 实际上是该批判传统的相对后来者。最重要的是，它显示了这些概念的发展是如何直接回应本土批判的力量的。事实上，我们需要付出巨大的努力来挽救欧洲的优越感，而启蒙思想家的目的正是要颠覆、颠覆和去中心化。当然，在接下来的一个多世纪里，这些思想成为了一个非常成功的策略，可以做到这一点。但它们也造成了大量的矛盾：例如，与历史上几乎任何其他帝国不同的是，欧洲殖民帝国被迫支持其自身的短暂性，声称自己只是加速其臣民走向文明的临时工具 —— 至少是那些与温达特人不同的、他们还没有从地图上抹去的臣民。

At this point we find ourselves back full circle with Rousseau.

在这一点上，我们发现自己又回到了卢梭的圈子内。

HOW JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, HAVING WON ONE PRESTIGIOUS ESSAY COMPETITION, THEN LOST ANOTHER (COMING IN OVER THE PERMITTED WORD LENGTH), BUT FINALLY WENT ON TO CONQUER THE WHOLE OF HUMAN HISTORY

让·雅克·卢梭如何在一次著名的作文比赛中获胜，然后又在另一次比赛中失利（超过允许的字数），但最后却征服了整个人类历史。

The exchange between Madame de Graffigny and Turgot gives us a sense of intellectual debate in France in the early 1750s; at least, in the saloniste circles with which Rousseau was familiar. Were freedom and equality universal values, or were they – at least in their pure form – inconsistent with a regime based on private property? Did the progress of arts and sciences lead to improved understanding of the world, and therefore to moral progress as well? Or was the indigenous critique correct, and the wealth and power of France simply a perverse side effect of unnatural, even pathological, social arrangements? These were the questions on every debater’s lips at the time.

格拉菲尼夫人和杜尔哥之间的交流让我们感受到了 1750 年代初法国的知识分子辩论；至少，在卢梭熟悉的沙龙主义圈子里是这样。自由和平等是普世价值吗，还是它们 —— 至少在其纯粹的形式上 —— 与基于私有财产的制度不一致？艺术和科学的进步是否导致了对世界的进一步理解，从而也导致了道德的进步？还是说本土批判是正确的，法国的财富和权力仅仅是不自然的、甚至是病态的社会安排的一个不正常的副作用？这些都是当时每个辩论者口中的问题。

If we know anything about those debates today, it’s largely because of their influence on Rousseau’s essay. The Discourse on the Origins of Social Inequality has been taught, debated and picked apart in a thousand classrooms – which is odd, because in many ways it is very much an eccentric outlier, even by the standards of its time.

如果我们今天对这些辩论有所了解，那主要是因为它们对卢梭文章的影响。《关于社会不平等起源的论述》已经在无数课堂上被教授、辩论和挑剔 —— 这很奇怪，因为在许多方面，即使以当时的标准来看，它也是一个非常古怪的异类。

In the early part of his life, Rousseau was known mainly as an aspiring composer. His rise to prominence as a social thinker began in 1750, when he took part in a contest sponsored by the same learned society, the Académie de Dijon, on the question, ‘Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to moral improvement?’⁴⁶ Rousseau won first prize, and national fame, with an essay in which he argued with great passion that they had not. Our elementary moral intuitions, he asserted, are fundamentally decent and sound; civilization merely corrupts by encouraging us to value form over content. Almost all the examples in this Discourse on the Arts and Sciences are taken from classical Greek and Roman sources – but in his footnotes, Rousseau hints at other sources of inspiration:

在他生命的早期，卢梭主要是作为一个有抱负的作曲家而闻名。他作为社会思想家的崛起始于 1750 年，当时他参加了由同一个学术团体 —— 第戎学院主办的竞赛，题目是：“科学和艺术的恢复是否有助于道德的提高？”⁴⁶卢梭以一篇文章赢得了一等奖和全国声誉，他在文章中以极大的热情论证了科学和艺术没有贡献。他断言，我们的基本道德直觉从根本上说是正派和健全的；文明只是通过鼓励我们重视形式而不是内容而使之堕落。在这篇《艺术与科学论》中，几乎所有的例子都取自希腊和罗马的古典资料 —— 但在他的脚注中，卢梭暗示了其他的灵感来源。

I don’t dare speak of those happy nations who do not know even the names of the vices which we have such trouble controlling, of those American savages whose simple and natural ways of keeping public order Montaigne does not hesitate to prefer, not merely to the laws of Plato, but even to anything more perfect which philosophy will ever be able to dream up for governing a people. He cites a number of striking examples of these for those who understand how to admire them. What’s more, he says, they don’t wear breeches!⁴⁷

我不敢说那些幸福的民族，他们甚至不知道我们难以控制的恶习的名称，也不敢说那些美洲的野蛮人，蒙田毫不犹豫地认为他们维持公共秩序的简单而自然的方式，不仅优于柏拉图的法律，甚至优于任何哲学所能梦想出来的治理人民的更完美的东西。他为那些懂得欣赏的人列举了许多引人注目的例子。他说，更重要的是，他们不穿马裤!⁴⁷

Rousseau’s victory sparked something of a scandal. It was considered controversial, to say the least, for an academy dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences to award top honours to an argument stating that the arts and sciences were entirely counterproductive. As for Rousseau, he spent much of the next several years writing well-publicized responses to criticisms of the piece (as well as using his new fame to produce a comic opera, The Village Soothsayer, which became popular at the French court). When in 1754 the Académie de Dijon announced a new contest on the origins of social inequality, they clearly felt they had to put the upstart in his place.

卢梭的胜利引发了一些丑闻。至少可以说，一个致力于推动艺术和科学发展的学院将最高荣誉授予一个声称艺术和科学完全是反作用的论点，这被认为是有争议的。至于卢梭，在接下来的几年里，他花了很多时间来写一些广为人知的回应，以回应对该作品的批评（同时利用他的新名声制作了一部喜剧歌剧《乡村占卜师》，该剧在法国宫廷很受欢迎）。1754 年，第戎学院宣布就社会不平等的起源进行一次新的竞赛，他们显然认为必须把这个新秀放在自己的位置上。

Rousseau took the bait. He submitted an even more elaborate treatise, clearly designed to shock and confound. Not only did it fail to win the prize (which was bestowed on a very conventional essay by a representative of the religious establishment named the Abbé Talbert, who attributed our current unequal condition largely to original sin), but the judges announced that, since Rousseau’s submission went far over the word limit, they had not even read it all the way through.

卢梭上钩了。他提交了一篇更为详尽的论文，显然是为了让人震惊和困惑。这篇论文不仅没有获奖（获奖者是一位名叫塔尔伯特神父的宗教机构代表，他将我们目前的不平等状况主要归因于原罪，这篇论文非常传统），而且评委们宣布，由于卢梭提交的论文远远超过了字数限制，他们甚至都没有读完。

Rousseau’s essay is undoubtedly odd. It’s also not exactly what it’s often claimed to be. Rousseau does not, in fact, argue that human society begins in a state of idyllic innocence. He argues, rather confusingly, that the first humans were essentially good, but nonetheless systematically avoided one another for fear of violence. As a result, human beings in a State of Nature were solitary creatures, which allows him to make a case that ‘society’ itself – that is, any form of ongoing association between individuals – was necessarily a restraint on human freedom. Even language marked a compromise. But the real innovation Rousseau introduces comes at the key moment of humanity’s ‘fall from grace’, a moment triggered, he argues, by the emergence of property relations.

卢梭的文章无疑是古怪的。它也不完全是它经常声称的那样。事实上，卢梭并没有论证人类社会开始于一种田园诗般的纯真状态。他认为，相当令人困惑的是，最初的人类本质上是好的，但由于害怕暴力而系统地相互回避。因此，自然状态下的人类是孤独的生物，这使他能够证明 “社会” 本身 —— 即个人之间任何形式的持续联系 —— 必然是对人类自由的一种限制。甚至语言也标志着一种妥协。但卢梭引入的真正创新是在人类 “失宠” 的关键时刻，他认为这一时刻是由财产关系的出现引发的。

Rousseau’s model of human society – which, he repeatedly emphasizes, is not meant to be taken literally, but is simply a thought experiment – involves three stages: a purely imaginary State of Nature, when individuals lived in isolation from one another; a stage of Stone Age savagery, which followed the invention of language (in which he includes most of the modern inhabitants of North America and other actually observable ‘savages’); then finally, civilization, which followed the invention of agriculture and metallurgy. Each marks a moral decline. But, as Rousseau is careful to emphasize, the entire parable is a way to understand what made it possible for human beings to accept the notion of private property in the first place:

卢梭的人类社会模型 —— 他反复强调，这并不意味着按字面意思理解，而只是一个思想实验 —— 涉及三个阶段：一个纯粹想象的自然状态，当时个人彼此孤立地生活；一个石器时代的野蛮阶段，在语言发明之后（他把北美的大部分现代居民和其他实际可观察到的 “野蛮人” 包括在其中）；最后是文明，在农业和冶金发明之后。每一个都标志着道德的衰退。但是，正如卢梭小心翼翼地强调的那样，整个寓言是一种理解人类首先有可能接受私有财产这一概念的方式。

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, ‘This is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars and murders, how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone, and that the earth itself belongs to no one!’ But it is highly probable that by this time things had reached a point beyond which they could not go on as they were; for the idea of property, depending on many prior ideas which could only have arisen in successive stages, was not formed all at once in the human mind.⁴⁸

第一个围起一块土地，想说 “这是我的”，并发现人们足够简单地相信他的人，是公民社会的真正创始人。如果有人拉起木桩，填平沟渠，并向他的同胞们喊道：“小心听信这个骗子的话，人类将免于多少犯罪、战争和谋杀，多少痛苦和恐怖。如果你忘记了地球上的果实属于每个人，而地球本身不属于任何人，你就会迷失方向！” 但极有可能的是，这时事情已经到了一个地步，不能再像以前那样发展下去了；因为财产的观念取决于许多先前的观念，而这些观念只能在连续的阶段中产生，并不是一下子在人的头脑中形成的。⁴⁸

Here, Rousseau asks exactly the same question that puzzled so many indigenous Americans. How is it that Europeans are able to turn wealth into power; turn a mere unequal distribution of material goods – which exists, at least to some degree, in any society – into the ability to tell others what to do, to employ them as servants, workmen or grenadiers, or simply to feel that it was no concern of theirs if they were left dying in a feverish bundle on the street?

在这里，卢梭提出的问题与许多美洲原住民所困惑的问题完全相同。为什么欧洲人能够把财富变成权力；把仅仅是物质产品的不平等分配 —— 至少在某种程度上存在于任何社会 —— 变成对他人指手画脚的能力，把他们雇为仆人、工人或手榴弹兵，或者干脆觉得如果他们被丢在大街上发热捆绑着死去也与他们无关？

While Rousseau does not cite Lahontan or the Jesuit Relations directly, he was clearly familiar with them,⁴⁹ as any intellectual of the time would have been, and his work is informed by the same critical questions: why are Europeans so competitive? Why do they not share food? Why do they submit themselves to other people’s orders? Rousseau’s long excursus on pitié – the natural sympathy that, he argues, savages have for one another and the quality that holds off the worst depredations of civilization in its second phase – only makes sense in light of the constant indigenous exclamations of dismay to be found in those books: that Europeans just don’t seem to care about each other; that they are ‘neither generous nor kind’.⁵⁰

虽然卢梭没有直接引用《拉洪丹》或《耶稣会关系》，但他显然对它们很熟悉。⁴⁹就像当时的任何知识分子一样，他的作品中也有同样的批评问题：为什么欧洲人如此竞争？为什么他们不分享食物？为什么他们要屈从于别人的命令？卢梭关于 “同情” 的长篇论述 —— 他认为， 野蛮人之间的自然同情，以及在第二阶段阻止文明最严重的掠夺的品质 —— 只有在那些书中不断发现的土著人的失望感叹中才有意义：欧洲人似乎并不关心彼此；他们 “既不慷慨也不善良”。⁵⁰

The reason for the essay’s astonishing success, then, is that for all its sensationalist style, it’s really a kind of clever compromise between two or perhaps even three contradictory positions on the most urgent social and moral concerns of eighteenth-century Europe. It manages to incorporate elements of the indigenous critique, echoes of the biblical narrative of the Fall, and something that at least looks a great deal like the evolutionary stages of material development that were only just being propounded, around that time, by Turgot and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. Rousseau agrees, in essence, with Kandiaronk’s view that civilized Europeans were, by and large, atrocious creatures, for all the reasons that the Wendat had outlined; and he agrees that property is the root of the problem. The one – major – difference between them is that Rousseau, unlike Kandiaronk, cannot really envisage society being based on anything else.

那么，这篇文章之所以取得了惊人的成功，是因为就其耸人听闻的风格而言，它实际上是一种巧妙的妥协，在两个甚至三个对 18 世纪欧洲最紧迫的社会和道德问题的相互矛盾的立场之间进行妥协。它设法纳入了本土批判的元素，呼应了圣经中关于堕落的叙述，以及一些至少看起来很像物质发展的进化阶段的东西，而这些阶段在当时只是由杜尔哥和苏格兰启蒙思想家提出的。卢梭在本质上同意坎迪阿伦克的观点，即文明的欧洲人大体上是残暴的生物，原因正如温达特人所概述的那样；而且他同意财产是问题的根源。他们之间的一个 —— 主要 —— 区别是，卢梭与坎迪阿伦克不同，不能真正设想社会建立在任何其他基础上。

In translating the indigenous critique into terms that French philosophers could understand, this sense of possibility is precisely what was lost. To Americans like Kandiaronk, there was no contradiction between individual liberty and communism – that’s to say, communism in the sense we’ve been using it here, as a certain presumption of sharing, that people who aren’t actual enemies can be expected to respond to one another’s needs. In the American view, the freedom of the individual was assumed to be premised on a certain level of ‘baseline communism’, since, after all, people who are starving or lack adequate clothes or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything, other than whatever it takes to stay alive.

在将本土批判翻译成法国哲学家可以理解的术语时，这种可能性的感觉恰恰是失去的。对于像坎迪阿伦克这样的美洲人来说，个人自由和共产主义之间并不存在矛盾 —— 也就是说，在我们在这里一直使用的意义上的共产主义，作为某种共享的假设，可以期望不是真正的敌人的人们对彼此的需求做出回应。在美洲人看来，个人的自由被认为是以某种程度的 “基线共产主义” 为前提的，因为，毕竟，在暴风雪中挨饿或缺乏足够的衣服或住所的人，除了为了活命而做的任何事情之外，并没有真正的自由。

The European conception of individual freedom was, by contrast, tied ineluctably to notions of private property. Legally, this association traces back above all to the power of the male household head in ancient Rome, who could do whatever he liked with his chattels and possessions, including his children and slaves.⁵¹ In this view, freedom was always defined – at least potentially – as something exercised to the cost of others. What’s more, there was a strong emphasis in ancient Roman (and modern European) law on the self-sufficiency of households; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of the will, but being in no way dependent on other human beings (except those under one’s direct control). Rousseau, who always insisted he wished to live without being dependent on others’ help (even as he had all his needs attended to by mistresses and servants), played out this very same logic in the conduct of his own life.⁵²

相比之下，欧洲的个人自由概念与私有财产的概念不可避免地联系在一起。在法律上，这种联系首先可以追溯到古罗马男性户主的权力，他可以对他的动产和财产，包括他的孩子和奴隶做任何事情。⁵¹在这种观点中，自由总是被定义为 —— 至少是潜在的 —— 以他人为代价行使的东西。更重要的是，在古代，罗马（和现代欧洲）的法律非常强调家庭的自给自足；因此，真正的自由意味着根本意义上的自主，不仅仅是意志的自主，而是绝不依赖其他人类（除了那些在自己直接控制下的人类）。卢梭一直坚持他希望在不依赖他人帮助的情况下生活（即使他的所有需求都由情妇和仆人来满足），在他自己的生活行为中发挥了这种相同的逻辑。⁵²

When our ancestors, Rousseau wrote, made the fatal decision to divide the earth into individually owned plots, creating legal structures to protect their property, then governments to enforce those laws, they imagined they were creating the means to preserve their liberty. In fact, they ‘ran headlong to their chains’. This is a powerful image, but it is unclear what Rousseau felt this lost liberty would actually have looked like; especially if, as he insisted, any ongoing human relationship, even one of mutual aid, is itself a restraint on liberty. It’s hardly surprising that he ends up inventing a purely imaginary age in which each individual wandered alone among the trees; more surprising, perhaps, that his imaginary world has come so often to define the arc of our own horizons. How did this happen?

卢梭写道，当我们的祖先做出致命的决定，将地球划分为个人所有的地块，建立法律结构来保护他们的财产，然后由政府来执行这些法律时，他们想象自己是在创造保护他们自由的手段。事实上，他们 “一头扎进了他们的锁链”。这是一个强有力的形象，但不清楚卢梭认为这种失去的自由实际上是什么样子的；特别是如果像他所坚持的那样，任何持续的人类关系，即使是互助的关系，本身就是对自由的限制。他最后发明了一个纯粹想象的时代，在这个时代里，每个人都在树丛中独自徘徊，这并不令人惊讶；更令人惊讶的是，他的想象中的世界如此频繁地界定了我们自己视野的弧度。这一切是如何发生的？

IN WHICH WE CONSIDER RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE, THE MYTH OF PROGRESS AND THE BIRTH OF THE LEFT

其中，我们考虑了本土批判、进步的神话和左派的诞生之间的关系。

As we’ve mentioned before, in the wake of the French Revolution conservative critics blamed Rousseau for almost everything. Many held him personally responsible for the guillotine. The dream of restoring the ancient state of liberty and equality, they argued, led to exactly the effects Turgot had predicted: an Inca-style totalitarianism that could only be enforced through revolutionary terror.

正如我们之前提到的，在法国大革命之后，保守的批评家几乎把一切都归咎于卢梭。许多人认为他个人应对断头台负责。他们认为，恢复古代自由和平等状态的梦想恰恰导致了杜尔哥所预言的效果：一个只能通过革命的恐怖来实施的印加式极权主义。

It is true that political radicals at the time of the American and French Revolutions embraced Rousseau’s ideas. Here, for example, is an extract purportedly from a manifesto written in 1776 which almost perfectly reproduces Rousseau’s fusion of evolutionism and critique of private property as leading directly to the origins of the state:

诚然，美洲和法国革命时期的政治激进分子接受了卢梭的思想。例如，这里有一段据称来自 1776 年写的宣言的摘录，它几乎，完美地再现了卢梭把进化论和对私有财产的批判融合在一起，直接导致了国家的起源。

As families multiplied, the means of subsistence began to fail; the nomad (or roaming) life ceased, and PROPERTY started into existence; men chose habitations; agriculture made them intermix. Language became universal; living together, one man began to measure his strength with another, and the weaker were distinguished from the stronger. This undoubtedly created the idea of mutual defence, of one individual governing diverse families reunited, and of thus defending their persons and their fields against the invasion of an enemy; but hence LIBERTY was ruined in its foundation, and EQUALITY disappeared.⁵³

随着家庭的增多，生存手段开始失效；游牧（或漫游）生活停止了，物业开始存在；人们选择居住地；农业使他们相互融合。语言变得普遍；人们生活在一起，一个人开始用另一个人衡量自己的力量，弱者与强者被区分开来。这无疑创造了相互防卫的观念，一个人管理着不同的家庭，从而保护他们的人身和他们的土地免受敌人的入侵；但因此，自由的基础被毁了，平等也消失了。⁵³

These words are drawn from the purported manifesto of the Secret Order of the Illuminati, a network of revolutionary cadres organized within the Freemasons by a Bavarian law professor named Adam Weishaupt. The organization did exist in the late eighteenth century; its purpose was apparently to educate an enlightened international, or even anti-national, elite to work for the restoration of freedom and equality.

这些话摘自据称是光照会的宣言，这是一个由巴伐利亚法律教授亚当·韦肖普特在共济会内组织的革命干部网络。该组织在十八世纪末确实存在；其目的显然是教育一个开明的国际精英，甚至是反国家的精英，为恢复自由和平等而努力。

Conservatives almost immediately denounced the Order, leading to it being banned in 1785, less than ten years after its foundation, but right-wing conspiracists insisted it continued to exist, and that the Illuminati were the hidden hands pulling the strings behind the French Revolution (or later even the Russian). This is silly, but one reason the fantasy was possible is that the Illuminati were perhaps the first to propose that a revolutionary vanguard, trained in the correct interpretation of doctrine, would be able to understand the overall direction of human history – and, therefore, be capable of intervening to speed up its progress.⁵⁴

保守派几乎立即谴责了这个组织，导致它在 1785 年被取缔，当时它成立还不到 10 年，但右翼阴谋家坚持认为它继续存在，并且认为光照会是法国大革命（甚至后来的俄国大革命）背后拉线的黑手。这很愚蠢，但这种幻想之所以可能，原因之一是，光照会也许是第一个提出在正确解释教义方面受过训练的革命先锋队，能够了解人类历史的总体方向 —— 因此，能够进行干预以加速其进展。⁵⁴

It may seem ironic that Rousseau, who began his career by taking what we would now consider an arch-conservative position – that seeming progress leads only to moral decay – would end up becoming the supreme bête noire of so many conservatives.⁵⁵ But a special vitriol is always reserved for traitors.

卢梭的职业生涯开始于我们现在认为是大保守主义的立场 —— 看似进步只会导致道德败坏 —— 最后却成为这么多保守派的头号罪人，这似乎很讽刺。⁵⁵但是，对叛徒总是有一种特殊的恶意。

Many conservative thinkers see Rousseau as having gone full circle from a promising start to creating what we now think of as the political left. Nor are they entirely wrong in this. Rousseau was indeed a crucial figure in the formation of left-wing thought. One reason intellectual debates of the mid eighteenth century seem so strange to us nowadays is precisely that what we understand as left/right divisions had not yet crystallized. At the time of the American Revolution, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ themselves did not yet exist. A product of the decade immediately following, they originally referred to the respective seating positions of aristocratic and popular factions in the French National Assembly of 1789.

许多保守派思想家认为，卢梭从一个充满希望的开始到创造出我们现在认为的政治左派，走了一个完整的圈子。他们的看法也不完全错误。卢梭的确是左翼思想形成过程中的一个关键人物。十八世纪中叶的知识分子辩论在我们今天看来如此奇怪，原因之一正是我们所理解的左/右之分尚未具体化。在美洲革命的时候，“左” 和 “右” 这两个词本身还不存在。作为紧随其后的十年的产物，它们最初指的是 1789 年法国国民议会中贵族和民众派别各自的座位位置。

Let us emphasize (we really shouldn’t have to) that Rousseau’s effusions on the fundamental decency of human nature and lost ages of freedom and equality were in no sense themselves responsible for the French Revolution. It’s not as if he somehow caused the sans culottes to rise up by putting such ideas into their heads (as we’ve noted, for most of European history intellectuals seem to have been the only class of people who weren’t capable of imagining that other worlds might be brought into being). But we can argue that, in folding together the indigenous critique and the doctrine of progress originally developed to counter it, Rousseau did in fact write the founding document of the left as an intellectual project.

让我们强调一下（我们真的不需要强调），卢梭对人性的基本尊严和失去自由与平等的时代的赞美，从某种意义上说，本身并不对法国大革命负责。他并没有以某种方式将这些思想灌输给无产阶级，从而导致他们起义（正如我们已经注意到的，在欧洲历史的大部分时间里，知识分子似乎是唯一没有能力想象其他世界可能出现的一类人）。但我们可以争辩说，在将本土批判和最初为对抗它而发展的进步学说融合在一起时，卢梭事实上写下了作为知识项目的左派的创始文件。

For the same reason, right-wing thought has from the beginning been suspicious not just about ideas of progress, but also the entire tradition that emerged from the indigenous critique. Today, we assume that it is largely those on the political left who speak about the ‘myth of the noble savage’, and that any early European account that idealizes faraway people, or even attributes to them cogent opinions, is really just a romantic projection of European fantasies on to people the authors could never genuinely understand. The racist denigration of the savage, and naive celebration of savage innocence, are always treated as two sides of the same imperialist coin.⁵⁶ Yet originally this was an explicitly right-wing position, as explained by Ter Ellingson, the contemporary anthropologist who has reviewed the subject most comprehensively. Ellingson concluded there never was a ‘noble savage’ myth; at least not in the sense of a stereotype of simple societies living in an age of happy primordial innocence. Rather, travellers’ accounts tend to supply a much more ambivalent picture, describing alien societies as a complicated, sometimes (to them) incoherent, mix of virtues and vices. What needs to be investigated, instead, might better be called the ‘myth of the myth of the noble savage’: why is it that certain Europeans began attributing such a naive position to others? The answer isn’t pretty. The phrase ‘noble savage’ was in fact popularized a century or so after Rousseau, as a term of ridicule and abuse. It was deployed by a clique of outright racists, who in 1859 – as the British Empire reached its height of power – took over the British Ethnological Society and called for the extermination of inferior peoples.

出于同样的原因，右翼思想从一开始就不仅怀疑进步的思想，而且怀疑从本土批评中产生的整个传统。今天，我们认为主要是那些政治上的左派在谈论 “高贵的野蛮人的神话”，任何将遥远的民族理想化，甚至将有说服力的观点赋予他们的早期欧洲人的叙述，实际上只是欧洲人的幻想投射到作者永远无法真正理解的人身上的浪漫。对野蛮人的种族主义诋毁和对野蛮人纯真的天真赞美，总是被视为同一枚帝国主义硬币的两面。⁵⁶然而，这原本是一个明确的右翼立场，正如当代人类学家特尔·埃林森所解释的那样，他最全面地审查了这个问题。埃林森的结论是，从来没有一个 “高贵的野蛮人” 的神话；至少不是生活在快乐的原始纯真时代的简单社会的刻板印象的意义。相反，旅行者的描述倾向于提供一个更加矛盾的画面，将外来社会描述为一个复杂的，有时（对他们来说）不连贯的，美德和恶习的混合体。相反，需要调查的是，最好称之为 “高贵的野蛮人的神话”：为什么某些，欧洲人开始将如此天真的立场归于他人？答案并不美好。事实上，“高贵的野蛮人” 这个短语是在卢梭之后一个多世纪流行起来的，作为一个嘲笑和辱骂的术语。它是由一群彻头彻尾的种族主义者使用的，他们在 1859 年 —— 当大英帝国达到其权力的顶峰时 —— 接管了英国人种学协会，并呼吁灭绝劣等民族。

The original exponents of the idea blamed Rousseau, but before long students of literary history were scouring the archives looking for traces of the ‘noble savage’ everywhere. Almost all the texts discussed in this chapter came under scrutiny; all were dismissed as dangerous, romantic fantasies. At first, however, these dismissals came from the political right. Ellingson makes a particular example of Gilbert Chinard, whose 1913 volume L’Amérique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (America and the Exotic Dream in French Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries) was primarily responsible for establishing the notion of the ‘noble savage’ as a Western literary trope in American universities, since he was perhaps the least shy about his political agenda.

这一观点的最初提出者指责卢梭，但不久之后，文学史的学生就开始翻阅档案，到处寻找 “高贵的野蛮人” 的踪迹。本章讨论的几乎所有文本都受到了审查；所有文本都被斥为危险的、浪漫的幻想。然而，一开始，这些否定来自于政治右派。埃林森特别举了吉尔伯特·奇纳德的例子，他在 1913 年出版的《十七和十八世纪法国文学中的美洲和异域之梦》主要负责在美洲大学中确立 “高贵的野蛮人” 的概念，因为他可能是对其政治议程最不忌讳的人。

Citing Lahontan as the key figure in the formation of this notion, Chinard argued that Rousseau borrowed specific arguments either from Lahontan’s Memoirs or his Dialogues with Kandiaronk. In a broader sense, he detects an affinity of temperament:

奇纳德把拉洪丹作为这一概念形成的关键人物，认为卢梭从拉洪丹的《回忆录》或他与坎迪阿伦克的对话中借用了具体的论据。在更广泛的意义上，他发现了一种气质上的亲和力：

It is Jean-Jacques [Rousseau], more than any other author, that the author of the Dialogues with a Savage resembles. With all his faults, his fundamentally ignoble motives, he has put into his style a passion, an enthusiasm which has no equivalent except in the Discourse on Inequality. Like Rousseau, he is an anarchist; like him, he is bereft of moral sensibility, and to a considerably greater degree; like him, he imagines himself to be the prey of persecutions of the human race leagued against himself; like him, he is indignant about the sufferings of the miserable and, even more than him, he throws out the call to arms; and like him, above all, he attributes to property all the evils that we suffer. In this, he permits us to establish a direct connection between the Jesuit missionaries and Jean-Jacques.⁵⁷

《与野人对话》的作者比任何其他作者都更像让·雅克·卢梭。尽管他有种种缺点，他的动机根本上是不光彩的，但他在自己的风格中注入了一种激情，一种除了在《不平等论》中之外没有其他作品可以比拟的热情。像卢梭一样，他是一个无政府主义者；像他一样，他缺乏道德感，而且程度更深；像他一样，他想象自己是人类联合起来迫害自己的猎物；像他一样，他对悲惨的人的痛苦感到愤慨，甚至比他更多地抛出了武器的召唤；像他一样，最重要的是，他把我们遭受的所有恶行都归于财产。在这一点上，他允许我们在耶稣会传教士和让·雅克之间建立一种直接的联系。⁵⁷

According to Chinard, even the Jesuits (Lahontan’s ostensible enemies) were ultimately playing the same game of introducing deeply subversive notions through the back door. Their motives in quoting the exasperated observations of their interlocutors were not innocent. Commenting directly on the above passage, Ellingson quite reasonably asks what on earth Chinard is actually talking about here: some kind of anarchist movement perpetrated by Lahontan, the Jesuits and Rousseau? A conspiracy theory to explain the French Revolution? Yes, concludes Ellingson, it almost is. The Jesuits, according to Chinard, have promoted ‘dangerous ideas’ in giving us the impression of the good qualities of ‘savages’, and ‘this impression seems to have been contrary to the interests of the monarchical state and religion.’ In fact, Chinard’s fundamental characterization of Rousseau is as ‘un continuateur des missionaires Jésuites’, and he holds the missionaries responsible for giving rise to ‘the revolutionary spirits [who] would transform our society and, inflamed by reading their relations, bring us back to the state of the American savages’.⁵⁸

根据奇纳德的说法，即使是耶稣会（拉洪丹的表面敌人）最终也在玩同样的游戏，通过后门引入深颠覆性的概念。他们引用对话者气急败坏的意见的动机并不单纯。在直接评论上述段落时，埃林森很合理地问道，奇纳德在这里究竟在说什么：某种由拉洪丹、耶稣会和卢梭实施的无政府主义运动？一个解释法国大革命的阴谋论？是的，埃林森总结说，这几乎就是。奇纳德认为，耶稣会士在给我们留下 “野蛮人” 的良好品质的印象时，宣传了 “危险的思想”，而 “这种印象似乎与君主制国家和宗教的利益相悖”。事实上，奇纳德对卢梭的基本定性是 ‘un continuateur des missionaires Jésuites’，即，耶稣会传教士的延续者；他认为传教士要对 “催生将改变我们社会的革命精神，并在阅读他们的关系后被激怒，使我们回到美洲野人的状态负责。”⁵⁸

For Chinard, whether or not European observers were reporting the views of their indigenous interlocutors accurately is irrelevant. For indigenous Americans were, as Chinard puts it, ‘a race different from our own’ with whom no meaningful relation was possible: one might as well, he implies, record the political opinions of a leprechaun.⁵⁹ What really matters, he emphasizes, are the motives of the white people involved – and these people were clearly malcontents and troublemakers. He accuses one early observer on the customs of the Greenland Inuit of inserting a mix of socialism and ‘illuminism’ into his descriptions – that is, viewing savage customs through a lens that might as well have been borrowed from the Secret Order of the Illuminati.⁶⁰

对奇纳德来说，欧洲观察员是否准确地报告了他们的土著对话者的观点并不重要。正如奇纳德所说，美洲原住民是 “一个与我们不同的种族”，与他们不可能有任何有意义的关系：他暗示，我们还不如记录一个小妖精的政治观点。⁵⁹他强调，真正重要的是有关白人的动机 —— 这些人显然是不满者和麻烦制造者。他指责一位研究格陵兰岛因纽特人习俗的早期观察家在他的描述中插入了社会主义和 “光照主义” 的混合物 —— 也就是说，通过一个可能是从光照会的秘密组织中借来的镜头来看待野蛮的习俗。⁶⁰

BEYOND THE ‘MYTH OF THE STUPID SAVAGE’ (WHY ALL THESE THINGS MATTER SO MUCH FOR OUR PROJECT IN THIS BOOK)

超越 “愚蠢的野蛮人的神话”（为什么所有这些东西对我们这本书的项目如此重要？

This is not the place to document how a right-wing critique morphed into a left-wing critique. To some degree, one can probably just put it down to the laziness of scholars schooled in the history of French or English literature, faced with the prospect of having to seriously engage with what a seventeenth-century Mi’kmaq might have actually been thinking. To say Mi’kmaq thought is unimportant would be racist; to say it’s unknowable because the sources were racist, however, does rather let one off the hook.

这里不是记录右翼批判如何演变成左翼批判的地方。在某种程度上，人们也许可以把它归结为受过法国或英国文学史教育的学者们的懒惰，面对不得不认真，研究一个十七世纪的米克马克人究竟在想什么的前景。如果说米克马克人的思想不重要，那就是种族主义；但如果说因为资料来源是种族主义的，所以它是不可知的，那就相当让人失望。

To some degree, too, such reluctance to engage with indigenous sources is based on completely legitimate protests on the part of those who have, historically, been romanticized. Many have remarked that, to those on the receiving end, being told you are an inferior breed and that therefore anything you say can be ignored, and being told you are an innocent child of nature or the embodiment of ancient wisdom, and that therefore everything you say must be treated as ineffably profound are almost equally annoying. Both attitudes appear designed to prevent any meaningful conversation.

在某种程度上，这种不愿意与原住民接触的态度也是基于那些在历史上被浪漫化的人的完全合理的抗议。许多人说，对那些接受者来说，被告知你是低等民族，因此你说的任何话都可以被忽视，以及被告知你是自然界的无辜孩子或古代智慧的化身，因此你说的一切都必须被视为不可言喻的深刻，几乎同样令人厌恶。这两种态度似乎都是为了阻止任何有意义的对话。

As we noted in our first chapter, when we set out to write this book we imagined ourselves making a contribution to the burgeoning literature on the origins of social inequality – except this time, one based on the actual evidence. As our research proceeded, we came to realize just how strange a question ‘what are the origins of social inequality?’ really was. Quite apart from the implications of primordial innocence, this way of framing the problem suggests a certain diagnosis of what is wrong with society, and what can and can’t be done about it; and as we’ve seen, it often has very little to do with what people living in those societies we’ve come to call ‘egalitarian’ actually feel makes them different from others.

正如我们在第一章中指出的那样，当我们开始写这本书时，我们想象自己为正在兴起的关于社会不平等起源的文献做出了贡献 —— 只不过这一次是基于实际证据的贡献。随着研究的进行，我们逐渐意识到 “社会不平等的起源是什么？” 这个问题真的很奇怪。除了原始纯真的含义之外，这个问题的框架方式暗示了对社会问题的某种诊断，以及可以和不可以做什么；正如我们所看到的，它往往与生活在那些我们称之为 “平等主义” 的社会中的人们实际感觉到的使他们与其他人不同的东西关系不大。

Rousseau sidestepped the question by reducing his savages to mere thought experiments. He was just about the only major figure of the French Enlightenment who didn’t write a dialogue or other imaginative work attempting to look at European society from a foreign point of view. In fact, he strips his ‘savages’ of any imaginative powers of their own; their happiness is entirely derived from their inability to imagine things otherwise, or to project themselves into the future in any way at all.⁶¹ They are thus also utterly lacking in philosophy. This is presumably why no one could foresee the disasters that would ensue when they first staked out property and began to form governments to protect it; by the time human beings were even capable of thinking that far ahead, the worst damage had already been done.

卢梭回避了这个问题，把他的野蛮人简化为单纯的思想实验。他是法国启蒙运动中唯一没有写过对话或其他想象力作品的主要人物，他试图从一个外国的角度来看待欧洲社会。事实上，他剥夺了他的 “野蛮人” 自己的任何想象力；他们的幸福完全来自于他们无法想象其他事情，或者以任何方式预测自己的未来。⁶¹因此，他们也完全缺乏哲学。这大概就是为什么在他们第一次划定财产并开始组建政府以保护财产时，没有人能够预见到随之而来的灾难；当人类甚至有能力考虑那么远的时候，最严重的破坏已经发生了。

Back in the 1960s, the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres suggested that precisely the opposite was the case. What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they’re actually more imaginative than we are? We find it difficult to picture what a truly free society would be like; perhaps they have no similar trouble picturing what arbitrary power and domination would be like. Perhaps they can not only imagine it, but consciously arrange their society in such a way as to avoid it. As we’ll see in the next chapter, Clastres’s argument has its limits. But by insisting that the people studied by anthropologists are just as self-conscious, just as imaginative, as the anthropologists themselves, he did more to reverse the damage than anyone before or since.

早在 20 世纪 60 年代，法国人类学家皮埃尔·克莱斯特就提出，情况恰恰相反。如果我们喜欢想象的那种简单和无辜的人没有统治者、政府、官僚机构、统治阶级等，不是因为他们缺乏想象力，而是因为他们实际上比我们更有想象力呢？我们发现很难想象一个真正的自由社会会是什么样子；也许他们在想象任意的权力和统治会是什么样子方面没有类似的困难。也许他们不仅能想象，而且有意识地安排他们的社会，以避免它。正如我们将在下一章看到的，克拉斯特里的论点有其局限性。但是，通过坚持认为人类学家所研究的人和人类学家自己一样有自我意识，一样有想象力，他在扭转损害方面做得比以前或以后的任何人都多。

Rousseau has been accused of many crimes. He is innocent of most of them. If there is really a toxic element in his legacy, it is this: not his promulgation of the image of the ‘noble savage’, which he didn’t really do, but his promulgation of what we might call the ‘myth of the stupid savage’ – even if one he considered blissful in its state of stupidity. Nineteenth-century imperialists adopted the stereotype enthusiastically, merely adding on a variety of ostensibly scientific justifications – from Darwinian evolutionism to ‘scientific’ racism – to elaborate on that notion of innocent simplicity, and thus provide a pretext for pushing the remaining free peoples of the world (or increasingly, as European imperial expansion continued, the formerly free peoples) into a conceptual space where their judgements no longer seemed threatening. This is the work we are trying to undo.

卢梭被指控犯有许多罪行。他在大多数情况下是无辜的。如果他的遗产中真的有一个有毒的因素，那就是：不是他对 “高贵的野蛮人” 形象的宣扬，他并没有真正做到这一点，而是他对我们可以称之为 “愚蠢的野蛮人的神话” 的宣扬 —— 即使是他认为在愚蠢的状态下是幸福的。十九世纪的帝国主义者热情地采用了这种刻板印象，只是增加了各种表面上的科学理由 —— 从达尔文的进化论到 “科学” 的种族主义 —— 来阐述这种无辜的简单概念，从而提供了一个借口，把世界上剩余的自由人民（或者随着欧洲帝国扩张的继续，越来越多的前自由人民）推入一个概念空间，使他们的判断不再显得有威胁。这就是我们正试图撤销的工作。

‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ was the rallying cry of the French Revolution.⁶² Today there are whole disciplines – sub-branches of philosophy and political science and legal studies – which take ‘equality’ as their principal subject matter. Everyone agrees that equality is a value; no one seems to agree on what the term actually refers to. Equality of opportunity? Equality of condition? Formal equality before the law?

“自由、平等、博爱” 是法国大革命的集结号。⁶²今天，有整个学科 —— 哲学、政治学和法律研究的分支 —— 将 “平等” 作为其主要主题。每个人都同意平等是一种价值观；但似乎没有人同意这个词到底指的是什么。机会的平等？条件的平等？法律面前的正式平等？

Similarly, societies like the seventeenth-century Mi’kmaq, Algonkians or Wendat are regularly referred to as ‘egalitarian societies’; or, if not, then as ‘band’ or ‘tribal’ societies, which is usually presumed to mean the same thing. It’s never entirely clear exactly what the term is supposed to refer to. Are we talking about an ideology, the belief that everyone in society should be the same – obviously not in all ways, but in certain respects that are considered particularly important? Or should it be one in which people actually are the same? What might either of these actually mean in practice? That all members of society have equal access to land, or treat each other with equal dignity, or are equally free to make their opinions known in public assemblies; or are we talking about some scale of measurement that can be imposed by the observer: cash income, political power, calorie intake, house size, number and quality of personal possessions?

同样，像十七世纪的米克马克人、阿尔冈克人或温达特人这样的社会也经常被称为 “平等主义社会”；或者，如果，则被称为 “族群” 或 “部落” 社会，这通常被推定为是同一意思。这个词到底指的是什么，从来都不完全清楚。我们谈论的是一种意识形态，即相信社会中的每个人都应该是一样的 —— 显然不是在所有方面，而是在某些被认为特别重要的方面？或者，它应该是一个人们实际上是相同的？这两种情况在实践中可能意味着什么？社会的所有成员都能平等地获得土地，或以平等的尊严对待彼此，或在公共集会中平等地自由发表意见；或者我们在谈论一些可以由观察者强加的衡量尺度：现金收入、政治权力、卡路里摄入量、房屋大小、个人财产的数量和质量？

Would equality mean the effacement of the individual, or the celebration of the individual? (After all, to an outside observer, a society where everyone was exactly the same, and one where they were all so completely different as to preclude any sort of comparison, would seem equally ‘egalitarian’.) Can one speak of equality in a society where elders are treated like gods and make all important decisions, if everyone in that society who survives past, say, fifty will eventually become an elder? What about gender relations? Many societies referred to as ‘egalitarian’ are only really egalitarian between adult men. Sometimes relations between men and women in such societies are anything but equal. At other times things are more ambiguous.

平等是指对个人的抹杀，还是对个人的庆祝？（毕竟，对于一个外部观察者来说，一个每个人都完全相同的社会，和一个他们都完全不同以至于无法进行任何比较的社会，似乎都是同样的 “平等主义”。）在一个长者被视作神明并做出所有重要决定的社会中，如果社会中每一个活过 50 岁的人最终都会成为长者，那么还能说是平等吗？那么性别关系呢？许多被称为 “平等主义” 的社会只是在成年男子之间真正的平等主义。在这样的社会中，有时男女之间的关系是不平等的。在其他时候，事情就比较模糊了。

It may be, for instance, that men and women in a given society are not only expected to perform different sorts of work, but hold different opinions about why work (or what sorts of work) is important in the first place, and therefore feel they have a higher status; or perhaps that their respective roles are so different, it makes no sense to compare them. Many of the societies encountered by the French in North America fit this description. They could be seen as matriarchal from one perspective, patriarchal from another.⁶³ In such cases, can we speak of gender equality? Or would we only be able to do so if men and women were also equal according to some minimal external criterion: being equally free from the threat of domestic violence, for example, or having equal access to resources, or equal say in communal affairs?

例如，在一个特定的社会中，男性和女性不仅被期望从事不同种类的工作，而且对为什么工作（或什么样的工作）首先是重要的持有不同的看法，因此觉得他们有更高的地位；或者也许他们各自的角色是如此不同，比较它们没有意义。法国人在北美洲遇到的许多社会都符合这种描述。从一个角度看，它们可以被视为母系社会，从另一个角度看则是父系社会。⁶³在这种情况下，我们能谈及性别平等吗？或者说，只有在男女在某些最低限度的外部标准上也是平等的情况下，我们才能这样做：例如，平等地不受家庭暴力的威胁，或平等地获得资源，或在社区事务中拥有平等的发言权？

Since there is no clear and generally accepted answer to any of these questions, use of the term ‘egalitarian’ has led to endless arguments. In fact, it remains entirely unclear what ‘egalitarian’ even means. Ultimately the idea is employed not because it has any real analytical substance, but rather for the same reason seventeenth-century natural law theorists speculated about equality in the State of Nature: ‘equality’ is a default term, referring to that kind of protoplasmic mass of humanity one imagines as being left over when all the trappings of civilization are stripped away. ‘Egalitarian’ people are those without princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests, and usually without cities or writing, or preferably even farming. They are societies of equals only in the sense that all the most obvious tokens of inequality are missing.

由于这些问题都没有明确和普遍接受的答案，使用 “平等主义” 一词导致了无尽的争论。事实上，“平等主义” 的含义仍然完全不清楚。归根结底，这个想法被采用并不是因为它有任何真正的分析性内容，而是因为 17 世纪的自然法理论家推测自然状态下的平等：“平等” 是一个默认的术语，指的是那种人们想象中的在所有文明的外衣被剥去后剩下的原生质的人类。“平等主义” 的人是那些没有王子、法官、监督者或世袭祭司的人，通常没有城市或文字，最好甚至没有耕作。他们是平等的社会，只是在所有最明显的不平等标志消失的意义上。

It follows that any historical work which purports to be about the origins of social inequality is really an inquiry into the origins of civilization; one which in turn implies a vision of history like that of Turgot, which conceives ‘civilization’ as a system of social complexity, guaranteeing greater overall prosperity, but at the same time ensuring that certain compromises will necessarily have to be made in the areas of freedom and equality. We will be trying to write a different kind of history, which will also require a different understanding of ‘civilization’.

因此，任何声称是关于社会不平等的起源的历史工作，实际上都是对文明起源的探究；这反过来又意味着像杜尔哥那样的历史观，即把 “文明” 设想为一个社会复杂性的系统，保证更大的整体繁荣，但同时确保在自由和平等方面必然要做出某些妥协。我们将尝试书写一种不同的历史，这也需要对 “文明” 有不同的理解。

To be clear, it’s not that we consider the fact that princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests – or for that matter, writing, cities and farming – only emerge at a certain point in human history to be uninteresting or insignificant. Quite on the contrary: in order to understand our current predicament as a species, it is absolutely crucial to understand how these things first came about. However, we would also insist that, in order to do so, we should reject the impulse to treat our distant ancestors as some sort of primordial human soup. Evidence accumulating from archaeology, anthropology and related fields suggests that – just like seventeenth-century Amerindians and Frenchmen – the people of prehistoric times had very specific ideas about what was important in their societies; that these varied considerably; and that describing such societies as uniformly ‘egalitarian’ tells us almost nothing about them.

明确地说，我们并不是认为王子、法官、监督员或世袭祭司 —— 或者就此而言，文字、城市和农耕 —— 只是在人类历史的某一时刻出现的事实是无趣的或不重要的。恰恰相反：为了理解我们作为一个物种目前所处的困境，理解这些东西最初是如何产生的绝对是至关重要的。然而，我们也会坚持认为，为了做到这一点，我们应该拒绝将我们遥远的祖先视为某种原始人类汤的冲动。从考古学、人类学和相关领域积累的证据表明 —— 就像十七世纪的美洲印第安人和法国人一样 —— 史前时代的人们对他们的社会中什么是重要的有非常具体的想法；这些想法差异很大；把这些社会描述成统一的 “平等主义” 几乎不能说明什么。

No doubt there was usually a degree of equality by default; an assumption that humans are all equally powerless in the face of the gods; or a strong feeling that no one’s will should be permanently subordinated to another’s. Presumably there must have been, if only to ensure that permanent princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests did not emerge for such long periods of time. But self-conscious ideas of ‘equality’, putting equality forward as an explicit value (as opposed to an ideology of freedom, or dignity, or participation that applies equally to all) appear to have been relative latecomers to human history. And even when they do appear, they rarely apply to everyone.

毫无疑问，通常有一定程度的默认平等；一种，即人类在诸神面前都同样无能为力；或者一种强烈的感觉，即任何人的意志都不应该永久地服从于另一个人的。如果只是为了确保永久的王子、法官、监督者或世袭的祭司不会在如此长的时间内出现，估计肯定是有的。但是自觉的 “平等” 观念，把平等作为一种明确的价值提出来（相对于自由、尊严或平等适用于所有人的参与的意识形态），似乎是人类历史上相对较晚出现的。即使它们出现了，它们也很少适用于所有人。

Ancient Athenian democracy, to take just one example, was based on political equality among its citizens – even if these were only somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent of the overall population – in the sense that each had the same rights to participate in public decision-making. We are taught to see this notion of equal civic participation as a milestone in political development, revived and expanded some 2,000 years later (as it happens, the political systems labelled ‘democracies’ in nineteenth-century Europe had almost nothing to do with ancient Athens, but this is not really the point). What’s more to the point is that Athenian intellectuals at the time, who were mostly of aristocratic background, tended to consider the whole arrangement a tawdry business, and most of them much preferred the government of Sparta, ruled by an even smaller percentage of the total population, who lived collectively off the labours of serfs.

仅举一例，古代雅典的民主是基于公民之间的政治平等 —— 即使这些公民只占总人口的 10% 到 20% 之间 —— 在这个意义上，每个人都有参与公共决策的相同权利。我们被教导将这种平等的公民参与概念视为政治发展的一个里程碑，并在大约 2000 年后得到恢复和扩展（恰好，19 世纪欧洲被称为 “民主” 的政治制度与古雅典几乎毫无关系，但这并不是真正的重点）。更重要的是，当时的雅典知识分子大多具有贵族背景，他们倾向于认为整个安排是一种肮脏的事情，他们中的大多数人更喜欢斯巴达政府，由占总人口比例更小的人统治，他们靠农奴的劳动集体生活。

Spartan citizens, in turn, referred to themselves as the Homoioi, which could be translated either as ‘the Equals’ or ‘Those Who Are All the Same’ – they all underwent the same rigorous military training, adopted the same haughty disdain for both effeminate luxuries and individual idiosyncrasies, ate in communal mess halls and spent most of their lives practising for war.

斯巴达公民则称自己为 Homoioi，可译为 “平等的人” 或 “都一样的人” —— 他们都接受了同样严格的军事训练，对娘娘腔的奢侈品和个人特质都采取了同样傲慢的蔑视态度，在公共食堂吃饭，一生中大部分时间都在为战争进行训练。

This is not, then, a book about the origins of inequality. But it aims to answer many of the same questions in a different way. There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. To understand how this situation came about, we should trace the problem back to what first made possible the emergence of kings, priests, overseers and judges. But we no longer have the luxury of assuming we already know in advance what the precise answers will turn out to be. Taking guidance from indigenous critics like Kandiaronk, we need to approach the evidence of the human past with fresh eyes.

WHY THE ‘SAPIENT PARADOX’ IS A RED HERRING; AS SOON AS WE WERE HUMAN, WE STARTED DOING HUMAN THINGS

为什么 “智人悖论” 是一个红鲱鱼；一旦我们是人类，我们就开始做人类的事情。

Human beings, today, are a fairly uniform species. This uniformity is not, in evolutionary terms, particularly old. Its genetic basis was established around half a million years ago, but it is almost certainly misguided to think we could ever specify a single, more recent point in time when Homo sapiens ‘emerged’ – that is, when all the various elements of the modern human condition converged, definitively, in some stupendous moment of creation.

今天，人类是一个相当统一的物种。从进化的角度来看，这种统一性并不特别古老。它的遗传基础是在 50 万年前建立的，但如果认为我们可以明确指出一个更近的时间点，即智人 “出现” 的时间点，也就是说，现代人类状况的所有元素在某个巨大的创造时刻明确地汇聚在一起，那几乎肯定是误导。

Consider the first direct evidence of what we’d now call complex symbolic human behaviour, or simply ‘culture’. Currently, it dates back no more than 100,000 years. Where exactly on the African continent this evidence for culture crops up is determined largely by conditions of preservation, and by the countries that have so far been most accessible for archaeological investigation. Rock shelters around the coastlands of South Africa are a key source, trapping prehistoric sediments that yield evidence of hafted tools and the expressive use of shell and ochre around 80,000 BC .⁹ Comparably ancient finds are also known from other parts of Africa, but it’s not until later, around 45,000 years ago – by which time our species was busily colonizing Eurasia – that similar evidence starts appearing much more widely, and in greater quantities.

考虑一下我们现在称之为复杂的象征性人类行为的第一个直接证据，或简单的 “文化”。目前，它可以追溯到不超过 10 万年前。在非洲大陆上，这种文化的证据究竟出现在哪里，主要取决于保存条件，以及迄今为止最容易进行考古调查的国家。南非海岸周围的岩石掩体是一个关键的来源，它捕获了史前的沉积物，产生了公元前 8 万年左右的有柄工具和使用贝壳和赭石的表现力的证据。⁹在非洲其他地区也有相当古老的发现，但直到后来，大约 4.5 万年前 —— 那时我们的物种正忙于殖民欧亚大陆 —— 类似的证据才开始更广泛地出现，而且数量更大。

In the 1980s and 1990s it was widely assumed that something profound happened, some kind of sudden creative efflorescence, around 45,000 years ago, variously referred to in the literature as the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Revolution’ or even the ‘Human Revolution’.¹⁰ But in the last two decades it has become increasingly clear to researchers that this is most likely an illusion, created by biases in our evidence.

在 20 世纪 80 年代和 90 年代，人们普遍认为在 4.5 万年前发生了一些深刻的事情，某种突如其来的创造性喷发，在文献中被称为 “旧石器时代上部革命” 甚至是 “人类革命”。¹⁰但在过去的二十年里，研究人员越来越清楚地认识到，这很可能是一种幻觉，是由我们的证据中的偏见造成的。

Here’s why. Much of the evidence for this ‘revolution’ is restricted to a single part of the world: Europe, where it is associated with replacement of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens around 40,000 BC . It includes more advanced toolkits for hunting and handicrafts, the first clear evidence for the making of images in bone, ivory and clay – including the famous sculpted ‘female figurines’,¹¹ dense clusters of carved and painted animal figures in caves, often observed with breathtaking accuracy; more elaborate ways of clothing and decorating the human body; the first attested use of musical instruments like bone flutes; regular exchange of raw materials over great distances, and also what are usually taken as the earliest proofs of social inequality, in the form of grand burials.

原因就在这里。这场 “革命” 的大部分证据仅限于世界的一个地区。欧洲，它与尼安德特人在公元前 40000 年左右被智人取代有关。它包括更先进的狩猎工具和手工艺品，用骨头、象牙和粘土制作图像的第一个明确证据 —— 包括著名的雕刻的 “女性雕像”。¹¹ 洞穴中密集的雕刻和绘画的动物形象，通常以惊人的精度进行观察；更精细的服装和人体装饰方式；首次证实使用骨笛等乐器；远距离定期交换原材料，以及通常被视为最早的社会不平等证据的大墓葬形式。

All this is impressive, and gives the impression of a lack of synchrony between the ticking of our genetic and cultural clocks. It seems to ask the question: why do so many tens of thousands of years stand between the biological origins of humanity and the widespread appearance of typically human forms of behaviour; between when we became capable of creating culture and when we finally got round to doing it? What were we actually doing in the interim? Many researchers have puzzled over this and have even coined a phrase for it: ‘the sapient paradox’.¹² A few go so far as to postulate some late mutation in the human brain to explain the apparently superior cultural capacities of Upper Palaeolithic Europeans, but such views can no longer be taken seriously.

所有这些都令人印象深刻，给人的印象是我们的基因时钟和文化时钟之间缺乏同步性。这似乎是在问一个问题：为什么在人类的生物起源和典型的人类行为形式的广泛出现之间，以及在我们有能力创造文化和我们最终开始这样做之间，会有这么多万年的时间？在这期间，我们究竟在做什么？许多研究人员对此感到困惑，甚至为此创造了一个短语：“智人悖论”。¹²少数人甚至推测人类大脑的某些晚期突变，以解释旧石器时代上部欧洲人明显优越的文化能力，但这种观点已不再被认真对待。

In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the whole problem is a mirage. The reason archaeological evidence from Europe is so rich is that European governments tend to be rich; and that European professional institutions, learned societies and university departments have been pursuing prehistory far longer on their own doorstep than in other parts of the world. With each year that passes, new evidence accumulates for early behavioural complexity elsewhere: not just Africa, but also the Arabian Peninsula, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent.¹³ Even as we write, a cave site on the coast of Kenya called Panga ya Saidi is yielding evidence of shell beads and worked pigments stretching back 60,000 years;¹⁴ and research on the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi is opening vistas on to an unsuspected world of cave art, many thousands of years older than the famous images of Lascaux and Altamira, on the other side of Eurasia.¹⁵ No doubt still earlier examples of complex pictorial art will one day be found somewhere on the continent of Africa.

事实上，越来越清楚的是，整个问题是一个幻觉。欧洲的考古证据之所以如此丰富，是因为欧洲政府往往很富有；而且欧洲的专业机构、学会和大学院系在自己家门口研究史前史的时间远远超过世界其他地方。随着时间的推移，其他地方的早期行为复杂性的新证据不断积累：不仅是非洲，还有阿拉伯半岛、东南亚和印度次大陆。¹³就在我们写这篇文章的时候，肯尼亚海岸的一个名为 Panga ya Saidi 的洞穴遗址正在产生 6 万年前的贝珠和加工颜料的证据。¹⁴婆罗洲岛和苏拉威西岛的研究为我们打开了一个未知的洞穴艺术世界，比欧亚大陆另一端的拉斯科和阿尔塔米拉的著名图像还要早几千年。¹⁵毫无疑问，在非洲大陆的某个地方，还将发现更早的复杂图像艺术的例子。

If anything, then, Europe was late to the party. Even after its initial colonization by modern humans – starting around 45,000 BC – the continent was still thinly populated, and the new arrivals coexisted there, albeit fairly briefly, with more established Neanderthal populations (themselves engaged in complex cultural activities of various sorts).¹⁶ Why there appears to be such a sudden cultural efflorescence, shortly after their arrival, may have something to do with climate and demography. To put it bluntly: with the movement of the ice sheets, human populations in Europe were living in harsher and more confined spaces than our species had encountered before. Game-rich valleys and steppe were bounded by tundra to the north and dense coastal forests to the south. We have to picture our ancestors moving between relatively enclosed environments, dispersing and gathering, tracking the seasonal movements of mammoth, bison and deer herds. While the absolute number of people may still have been startlingly small,¹⁷ the density of human interactions seems to have radically increased, especially at certain times of year. And with this came remarkable bursts of cultural expression.¹⁸

如果说有什么问题的话，那么，欧洲是迟到的。即使在现代人最初殖民之后 —— 大约从公元前 45000 年开始 —— 该大陆仍然人口稀少，新来的人在那里与更成熟的尼安德特人（他们自己从事各种复杂的文化活动）共存，尽管时间相当短暂。¹⁶为什么在他们到达后不久会出现如此突然的文化繁荣，这可能与气候和人口有关。直截了当地说：随着冰原的移动，欧洲的人类人口生活在比我们人类以前遇到的更严酷、更封闭的空间。猎物丰富的山谷和大草原被北部的苔原和南部的茂密海岸森林所包围。我们不得不想象我们的祖先在相对封闭的环境中移动，分散和采集，追踪猛犸象、野牛和鹿群的季节性移动。虽然人的绝对数量可能仍然少得惊人。¹⁷人类互动的密度似乎已经大大增加，特别是在一年中的某些时候。随之而来的是文化表达的显著爆发。¹⁸

WHY EVEN VERY SOPHISTICATED RESEARCHERS STILL FIND WAYS TO CLING TO THE IDEA THAT SOCIAL INEQUALITY HAS AN ‘ORIGIN’

为什么即使是非常成熟的研究人员仍然想方设法坚持认为社会不平等有一个 “起源” 的想法？

As we will see in a moment, the societies that resulted in what archaeologists call the Upper Palaeolithic period (roughly 50,000–15,000 BC ) – with their ‘princely’ burials and grand communal buildings – seem to completely defy our image of a world made up of tiny egalitarian forager bands. The disconnect is so profound that some archaeologists have begun taking the opposite tack, describing Ice Age Europe as populated by ‘hierarchical’ or even ‘stratified’ societies. In this, they make common cause with evolutionary psychologists who insist that dominance behaviour is hardwired in our genes, so much so that the moment society goes beyond tiny bands, it must necessarily take the form of some ruling over others.

稍后我们将看到，考古学家所称的上旧石器时代（大约公元前 5 万至 1.5 万年）的社会 —— 其 “王子” 式的墓葬和宏伟的公共建筑 —— 似乎完全违背了我们对一个由微小的平等主义觅食者组成的世界的印象。这种脱节是如此深刻，以至于一些考古学家已经开始采取相反的态度，将冰河时代的欧洲描述为由 “等级” 甚至 “分层” 社会居住。在这一点上，他们与进化心理学家达成了共识，后者坚持认为统治行为在我们的基因中是根深蒂固的，以至于当社会超越了小团体时，它必然会采取一些人统治其他人的形式。

Almost everyone who isn’t a Pleistocene archaeologist – that is, who is not forced to confront the evidence – simply ignores it and carries on exactly as they had before, writing as if hunter-gatherers can be assumed to have lived in a state of primordial innocence. As Christopher Boehm puts it, we seem doomed to play out an endless recycling of the war between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’: those who view humans as either innately hierarchical or innately egalitarian.

几乎所有不是更新世考古学家的人 —— 也就是说，没有被迫面对这些证据的人 —— 都简单地忽略它，完全像以前那样继续下去，写得好像可以假定狩猎·采集者生活在原始的纯真状态中。正如克里斯托弗·博姆所说，我们似乎注定要在 “霍布斯式的鹰派和卢梭式的鸽派” 之间进行无休止的循环战争：那些认为人类是天生的等级制度或天生的平等主义的人。

Boehm’s own work is revealing in this regard. An evolutionary anthropologist and a specialist in primate studies, he argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way. Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth – ridicule, shame, shunning (and in the case of inveterate sociopaths, sometimes even outright assassination)¹⁹ – none of which have any parallel among other primates.

在这方面，博姆自己的工作很有启示意义。作为一名进化人类学家和灵长类动物研究专家，他认为，虽然人类确实有一种本能的倾向，即从事支配·顺从行为，这无疑是从我们的类人猿祖先那里继承来的，但使社会成为独特的人类的是我们能够有意识地决定不采取这种方式。博姆仔细研究了非洲、南美和东南亚现有的平等主义觅食群体的人种学描述，发现了一整套集体采用的战术，将可能的吹牛者和欺凌者打倒在地 —— 嘲笑、羞辱、回避（对于顽固的反社会者来说，有时甚至直接暗杀）。¹⁹ —— 所有这些在其他灵长类动物中都不存在。

For instance, while gorillas do not mock each other for beating their chests, humans do so regularly. Even more strikingly, while the bullying behaviour might well be instinctual, counter-bullying is not: it’s a well-thought-out strategy, and forager societies who engage in it display what Boehm calls ‘actuarial intelligence’. That’s to say, they understand what their society might look like if they did things differently: if, for instance, skilled hunters were not systematically belittled, or if elephant meat was not portioned out to the group by someone chosen at random (as opposed to the person who actually killed the beast). This, he concludes, is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another. In this sense, one could say Aristotle was right when he described human beings as ‘political animals’ – since this is precisely what other primates never do, at least not to our knowledge.

例如，虽然大猩猩不会因为拍胸脯而互相嘲讽，但人类却经常这样做。更惊人的是，虽然欺凌行为很可能是本能的，但反欺凌却不是：它是一种经过深思熟虑的策略，从事这种行为的觅食者社会显示出博姆所说的 “精算智慧”。也就是说，他们了解如果他们以不同的方式做事，他们的社会可能会是什么样子：例如，如果熟练的猎人不被系统地贬低，或者如果大象的肉不是由随机选择的人（而不是真正杀死野兽的人）分给群体。他的结论是，这就是政治的本质：有意识地思考一个人的社会可能采取的不同方向，并明确论证为什么它应该走一条路而不是另一条。在这个意义上，当亚里士多德把人类描述为 “政治动物” 时，我们可以说他是对的 —— 因为这正是其他灵长类动物从未做过的事情，至少据我们所知是如此。

This is a brilliant and important argument – but, like so many authors, Boehm seems strangely reluctant to consider its full implications. Let’s do so now.

这是一个杰出而重要的论点 —— 但是，像许多作者一样，博姆似乎奇怪地不愿意考虑其全部含义。让我们现在就这样做。

If the very essence of our humanity consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements, would that not mean human beings should actually have explored a wide range of social arrangements over the greater part of our history? In the end, confusingly, Boehm assumes that all human beings until very recently chose instead to follow exactly the same arrangements – we were strictly ‘egalitarian for thousands of generations before hierarchical societies began to appear’ – thereby casually tossing early humans back into the Garden of Eden once again. Only with the beginnings of agriculture, he suggests, did we all collectively flip back to hierarchy. Before 12,000 years ago, Boehm insists, humans were basically egalitarian, living in what he calls ‘societies of equals, and outside the family there were no dominators’.²⁰

如果我们人类的本质在于我们是有自我意识的政治行为者，因此能够接受广泛的社会安排，这岂不是意味着人类，在我们历史的大部分时间里，我们实际上应该探索广泛的社会安排？最后，令人困惑的是，博姆假设所有人类直到最近都选择遵循完全相同的安排 —— 在等级社会开始出现之前，我们严格地 “平均主义了几千代” —— 从而随意地将早期人类再次抛回伊甸园。他认为，只有随着农业的开始，我们才集体地回到了等级制度。博姆坚持认为，在 1.2 万年前，人类基本上是平等的，生活在他所说的 “平等的社会中，在家庭之外，没有统治者”。²⁰

So, according to Boehm, for about 200,000 years political animals all chose to live just one way; then, of course, they began to rush headlong into their chains, and ape-like dominance patterns re-emerged. The solution to the battle between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’ turns out to be: our genetic nature is Hobbesian, but our political history is pretty much exactly as described by Rousseau. The result? An odd insistence that for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened. This is an unsettling conclusion, especially when we consider some of the actual archaeological evidence for the existence of ‘Palaeolithic politics’.

因此，根据博姆的说法，在大约 20 万年的时间里，政治动物都只选择一种生活方式；当然，后来他们开始一头扎进自己的枷锁里，猿猴般的统治模式重新出现。解决 “霍布斯式的鹰和卢梭式的鸽子” 之争的办法原来是：我们的遗传性质是霍布斯式的，但我们的政治历史几乎完全是卢梭描述的那样。其结果是什么？一个奇怪的坚持，即几万年来，什么都没有发生。这是一个令人不安的结论，特别是当我们考虑到 “旧石器时代政治” 存在的一些实际的考古学证据。

IN WHICH WE OBSERVE HOW GRAND MONUMENTS, PRINCELY BURIALS AND OTHER UNEXPECTED FEATURES OF ICE AGE SOCIETIES HAVE UPENDED OUR ASSUMPTIONS OF WHAT HUNTER-GATHERERS ARE LIKE, AND CONSIDER WHAT IT MIGHT MEAN TO SAY THERE WAS ‘SOCIAL STRATIFICATION’ SOME 30,000 YEARS AGO

在这本书中，我们观察到冰河时代社会的宏伟纪念碑、贵族墓葬和其他意想不到的特征如何颠覆了我们对狩猎采集者的假设，并考虑说大约 3 万年前有 “社会分层” 可能意味着什么。

Let’s start with rich hunter-gatherer burials. Examples can be found across much of western Eurasia, from the Dordogne to the Don. They include discoveries in rock shelters and open-air settlements. Some of the earliest come from sites like Sunghir in northern Russia and Dolní Věstonice in the Moravian basin, south of Brno, and date from between 34,000 and 26,000 years ago. What we find here are not cemeteries but isolated burials of individuals or small groups, their bodies often placed in striking postures and decorated – in some cases, almost saturated – with ornaments. In the case of Sunghir that meant many thousands of beads, laboriously worked from mammoth ivory and fox teeth. Originally, such beads would have decorated clothing made of fur and animal skins. Some of the most lavish costumes are from the conjoined burials of two boys, flanked by great lances made of straightened mammoth tusks.²¹

让我们从丰富的狩猎·采集者墓葬开始。在欧亚大陆西部的大部分地区，从多尔多涅河到顿河，都可以找到这样的例子。它们包括在岩石掩体和露天定居点的发现。一些最早的遗址来自俄罗斯北部的 Sunghir 和布尔诺南部摩拉维亚盆地的 Dolní Věstonice，其年代在 34000 年至 26000 年前。我们在这里发现的不是墓地，而是孤立的个人或小群体的墓葬，他们的尸体通常以引人注目的姿势摆放，并以装饰品装饰 —— 在某些情况下，几乎是饱和的。在 Sunghir 的案例中，这意味着数以千计的珠子，是用猛犸象牙和狐狸牙齿费力地加工而成。最初，这种珠子是用来装饰毛皮和兽皮制成的衣服的。一些最奢华的服装来自于两个男孩的连体葬，他们的两侧是用拉直的猛犸象牙制成的大长矛。²¹

At Dolní Věstonice, one triple burial contains two young men with elaborate headdresses, posed either side of an older man, all lying on a bed of soil stained red with ochre.²² Of similar antiquity is a group of cave burials unearthed on the coast of Liguria, near the modern border between Italy and France. Complete bodies of young or adult men, including one especially lavish interment known to archaeologists as Il Principe (‘the Prince’), were laid out in striking poses and suffused with jewellery, including beads made of marine shell and deer canines, as well as blades of exotic flint. Il Principe bears that name because he’s also buried with what looks to the modern eye like royal regalia: a flint sceptre, elk antler batons and an ornate headdress lovingly fashioned from perforated shells and deer teeth. Moving further west, to the Dordogne, we encounter a 16,000-year-old burial of a young woman, the so-called ‘Lady of Saint-Germain-de-la-Rivière’, which contains a rich assemblage of stomach and pelvic ornaments made of shell and stag teeth. The teeth are taken from deer hunted in the Spanish Basque country 190 miles away.²³

在 Dolní Věstonice，一个三层的墓葬包含了两个带着精致头饰的年轻人，摆在一个老年人的两侧，他们都躺在被赭石染成红色的土床上。²²在现代意大利和法国边界附近的利古里亚海岸出土的一组洞穴墓葬具有类似的古老性。年轻或成年男子的完整尸体，包括一个被考古学家称为 Il Principe（“王子”）的特别奢华的埋葬物，被摆出引人注目的姿势，并充满了珠宝，包括海洋贝壳和鹿齿制成的珠子，以及异国火石的刀片。Il Principe 之所以叫这个名字，是因为他还被埋葬在一个在现代人看来像皇室礼服的地方：燧石权杖、麋鹿角棒和一个用穿孔贝壳和鹿牙精心制作的华丽头饰。再往西走，到了多尔多涅，我们遇到了一个 16000 年前的年轻女子的墓葬，即所谓的 “圣日耳曼·德拉·里维埃夫人”，其中有大量用贝壳和鹿齿制成的腹部和骨盆装饰品。这些牙齿取自 190 英里外的西班牙巴斯克地区狩猎的鹿。²³

Such findings have completely altered the specialist view of human societies in prehistory. The pendulum has swung so far away from the old notion of egalitarian bands that some archaeologists now argue that, thousands of years before the origins of farming, human societies were already divided along lines of status, class and inherited power. As we’ll see, this is highly unlikely, but the evidence these archaeologists point to is real enough: for instance, the extraordinary outlays of labour involved in making grave goods (10,000 work hours for the Sunghir beads alone, by some estimates); the highly advanced and standardized methods of production, possibly suggesting specialized craftspeople; or the way in which exotic, prestigious materials were transported from very distant locations; and, most suggestive of all, a few cases where such wealth was buried with children, maybe implying some kind of inherited status.²⁴

这些发现完全改变了专家对史前人类社会的看法。钟摆已经远远偏离了平等主义的旧观念，以至于一些考古学家现在认为，在农耕起源的几千年前，人类社会就已经按照地位、阶级和继承的权力划分。正如我们将看到的，这是很不可能的，但这些考古学家指出的证据是足够真实的：例如，制作墓葬物品所涉及的非凡的劳动支出（根据一些估计，仅 Sunghir 珠子就有 10,000 个工作小时）；高度先进和标准化的生产方法，可能表明专门的工匠；或异国情调、有声望的材料从非常遥远的地方运输的方式；以及，最具有暗示性的，这种财富与儿童一起埋葬的少数情况，也许意味着某种继承的地位。²⁴

Another unexpected result of recent archaeological research, causing many to revise their view of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, is the appearance of monumental architecture. In Eurasia, the most famous examples are the stone temples of the Germus¸ Mountains, overlooking the Harran Plain in southeast Turkey. In the 1990s, German archaeologists, working on the plain’s northern frontier, began uncovering extremely ancient remains at a place known locally as Göbekli Tepe.²⁵ What they found has since come to be regarded as an evolutionary conundrum. The main source of puzzlement is a group of twenty megalithic enclosures, initially raised there around 9000 BC, and then repeatedly modified over many centuries. These enclosures were established at a time when the surrounding plain was a mixture of woodland and steppe, teeming with wild plant and animal species that colonized the Middle East as the last Ice Age was drawing to a close.

最近的考古研究的另一个出乎意料的结果，使许多人修改了他们对史前狩猎采集者的看法，就是纪念性建筑的出现。在欧亚大陆，最著名的例子是俯瞰土耳其东南部哈兰平原的格尔木山的石庙。20 世纪 90 年代，德国考古学家在该平原的北部边境工作时，开始在一个当地人称为 Göbekli Tepe 的地方发现了极其古老的遗迹。²⁵他们的发现后来被认为是一个进化的难题。令人困惑的主要来源是一组 20 个巨石围墙，最初是在公元前 9000 年左右建立的，然后在许多世纪中反复修改。这些围墙建立的时候，周围的平原是林地和草原的混合体，充斥着野生植物和动物物种，这些物种在最后一个冰河时代即将结束的时候在中东地区殖民。

The enclosures at Göbekli Tepe are massive. They comprise great T-shaped pillars, some over sixteen feet high and weighing up to a ton, which were hewn from the site’s limestone bedrock or nearby quarries. The pillars, at least 200 in total, were raised into sockets and linked by walls of rough stone. Each is a unique work of sculpture, carved with images from the world of dangerous carnivores and poisonous reptiles, as well as game species, waterfowl and small scavengers. Animal forms project from the rock in varying depths of relief: some hover coyly on the surface, others emerge boldly into three dimensions. These often nightmarish creatures follow divergent orientations, some marching to the horizon, others working their way down into the earth. In places, the pillar itself becomes a sort of standing body, with human-like limbs and clothing.

Göbekli Tepe 的围墙非常巨大。它们由巨大的 T 形柱子组成，有些柱子超过 16 英尺高，重达一吨，是由该遗址的石灰岩基岩或附近的采石场凿成的。这些柱子，至少有 200 根，被抬到插座里，用粗糙的石头墙连接起来。每一个都是独特的雕塑作品，雕刻着来自危险的食肉动物和有毒的爬行动物，以及野味物种、水禽和小型食腐动物的世界形象。动物的形态从岩石中凸显出来，浮雕的深度各不相同：有些在表面腼腆地盘旋，有些则大胆地出现在三维空间。这些往往是噩梦般的生物遵循不同的方向，有些向地平线行进，有些则向大地深处努力。在一些地方，柱子本身成为一种站立的身体，有类似人类的四肢和衣服。

The creation of these remarkable buildings implies strictly co-ordinated activity on a really large scale, even more so if multiple enclosures were constructed simultaneously, according to an overall plan (a current point of debate).²⁶ But the larger question remains: who made them? While groups of humans not too far away had already begun cultivating crops at the time, to the best of our knowledge those who built Göbekli Tepe had not. Yes, they harvested and processed wild cereals and other plants in season, but there is no compelling reason to see them as ‘proto-farmers’, or to suggest they had any interest in orienting their livelihoods around the domestication of crops. Indeed, there was no particular reason why they should, given the availability of fruits, berries, nuts and edible wild fauna in their vicinity. (In fact, there are good reasons to think the builders of Göbekli Tepe were different, in some quite startling ways, from nearby groups who were beginning to take up farming, but this will have to wait for a later chapter; for the moment, we’re just interested in the monuments.)

这些非凡的建筑的创造意味着在一个真正的大范围内严格协调的活动，如果多个围墙是根据一个整体计划同时建造的（目前是一个争论的焦点），情况就更加严重。²⁶但更大的问题仍然是：谁制造了它们？虽然当时不远处的人类群体，已经开始种植农作物，但据我们所知，建造 Göbekli Tepe 的人还没有。是的，他们在季节中收获和加工野生谷物和其他植物，但没有令人信服的理由将他们视为 “原农夫”，或表明他们对围绕作物驯化的生计有任何兴趣。事实上，鉴于他们附近有水果、浆果、坚果和可食用的野生动物，他们没有特别的理由要这样做。（事实上，我们有充分的理由认为哥贝克利特佩的建造者在某些方面与附近开始从事农业生产的群体不同，但这要等到以后的章节；目前，我们只对纪念碑感兴趣。）

To some, the raised location and orientation of the buildings at Göbekli Tepe suggest an astronomical or chronometric function, each chain of pillars aligned with a particular cycle of celestial movements. Archaeologists remain sceptical, pointing out that the structures may once have been roofed, and that their layout was subject to many alterations over time. But what has mostly intrigued scholars of different disciplines so far is something else: the apparent proof they offer that ‘hunter-gatherer societies had evolved institutions to support major public works, projects, and monumental constructions, and thus had a complex social hierarchy prior to their adoption of farming.’²⁷ Again, matters are not so simple, because these two phenomena – hierarchy and the measure of time – were closely interwoven.

在一些人看来，戈拜克利特佩的建筑物的凸起位置和方向表明其具有天文或计时功能，每条柱子链都与天体运动的特定周期相一致。考古学家们仍然持怀疑态度，他们指出这些建筑可能曾经有屋顶，而且它们的布局随着时间的推移发生了许多改变。但迄今为止，最让不同学科的学者感兴趣的是另一件事：他们提供的明显证据是：“狩猎采集社会已经进化出支持大型公共工程、项目和纪念性建筑的机构，因此在他们采用农耕之前就有了复杂的社会等级制度。²⁷同样，事情并不那么简单，因为这两种现象 —— 等级制度和时间的衡量 —— 是紧密交织在一起的。

While Göbekli Tepe is often presented as an anomaly, there is in fact a great deal of evidence for monumental construction of different sorts among hunter-gatherers in earlier periods, extending back into the Ice Age.

虽然 Göbekli Tepe 经常被认为是一个反常现象，但事实上有大量的证据表明，在早期的狩猎采集者中存在着不同种类的纪念碑建筑，并延伸到冰河时代。

In Europe, between 25,000 and 12,000 years ago public works were already a feature of human habitation across an area reaching from Kraków to Kiev. Along this transect of the glacial fringe, remains of impressive circular structures have been found that are clearly distinguishable from ordinary camp-dwellings in their scale (the largest were over thirty-nine feet in diameter), permanence, aesthetic qualities and prominent locations in the Pleistocene landscape. Each was erected on a framework made of mammoth tusks and bones, taken from many tens of these great animals, which were arranged in alternating sequences and patterns that go beyond the merely functional to produce structures that would have looked quite striking to our eyes, and magnificent indeed to people at the time. Great wooden enclosures of up to 130 feet in length also existed, of which only the post-holes and sunken floors remain.²⁸ Göbekli Tepe too is likely to have had its wooden counterparts.

在欧洲，25000 年至 12000 年前，在从克拉科夫到基辅的地区，公共工程已经成为人类居住的一个特点。沿着冰川边缘的这一横断面，发现了令人印象深刻的圆形建筑的遗迹，它们的规模（最大的直径超过 39 英尺）、持久性、美学质量和在更新世景观中的突出位置都与普通的营地住宅明显不同。 每一个都是在一个由猛犸象牙和骨头组成的框架上建立起来的，这些猛犸象牙和骨头取自几十头这些伟大的动物，它们以交替的顺序和模式排列，超越了单纯的功能，产生了在我们眼中相当引人注目的结构，对当时的人们来说确实很宏伟。还存在着长达 130 英尺的巨大的木制围栏，其中只有柱洞和下沉的地板被保留下来。²⁸Göbekli Tepe 也可能有其木制的对应物。

Monumentality is always to some degree a relative concept; that’s to say, a building or structure is ‘monumental’ only in comparison to other buildings and structures a viewer has actually experienced. Obviously, the Ice Age produced nothing on the scale of the Pyramids of Giza or the Roman Colosseum – but, by the standards of their day, the kind of structures we’ve been describing can only have been considered public works, involving sophisticated design and the co-ordination of labour on an impressive scale. Research at the Russian site of Yudinovo suggests that ‘mammoth houses’, as they are often called, were not in fact dwellings at all, but monuments in the strict sense: carefully planned and constructed to commemorate the completion of a great mammoth hunt (and the solidarity of the extended hunting group), using whatever durable parts remained once carcasses had been processed for their meat and hides; and later covered with sediment to create a durable marker in the landscape.²⁹ We are talking here about really staggering quantities of meat: for each structure (there were five at Yudinovo), there was enough mammoth to feed hundreds of people for around three months.³⁰ Open-air settlements like Yudinovo, Mezhirich and Kostenki, where such mammoth monuments were erected, often became central places whose inhabitants exchanged amber, marine shells and animal pelts over impressive distances.

纪念性在某种程度上总是一个相对的概念；也就是说，一个建筑或结构只有在与观众实际经历过的其他建筑和结构相比时才是 “纪念性的”。显然，冰河时代没有产生任何像吉萨金字塔或罗马斗兽场那样的规模 —— 但是，按照他们当时的标准，我们所描述的那种结构只能被认为是公共工程，涉及复杂的设计和规模惊人的劳动协调。在俄罗斯尤迪诺沃遗址的研究表明，人们常说的 “猛犸象房屋” 实际上根本不是住宅，而是严格意义上的纪念碑：精心策划和建造，以纪念一次伟大的猛犸象狩猎活动的完成（以及整个狩猎团体的团结），使用的是尸体被加工成肉和皮后剩下的任何耐用部件；后来用泥沙覆盖，在景观中形成一个持久的标记。²⁹我们在这里谈论的是真正数量惊人的肉：每个结构（在 Yudinovo 有五个），有足够的猛犸象供数百人食用约三个月。³⁰像 Yudinovo、Mezhirich 和 Kostenki 这样的露天定居点，在这些地方竖立着这样的猛犸象纪念碑，往往成为中心场所，居民们在令人印象深刻的距离内交换琥珀、海洋贝壳和动物皮毛。

So what are we to make of all this evidence for stone temples, princely burials, mammoth monuments and bustling centres of trade and craft production, stretching back far into the Ice Age? What are they doing there, in a Palaeolithic world where – at least on some accounts – nothing much is ever supposed to have happened, and human societies can best be understood by analogy with troops of chimps or bonobos? Unsurprisingly, perhaps, some have responded by completely abandoning the idea of an egalitarian Golden Age, concluding instead that this must have been a society dominated by powerful leaders, even dynasties – and, therefore, that self-aggrandizement and coercive power have always been the enduring forces behind human social evolution. But this doesn’t really work either.

那么，我们该如何看待所有这些关于石庙、王子墓葬、猛犸象纪念碑和繁华的贸易和手工业生产中心的证据，这些证据一直延伸到冰河时代？在一个旧石器时代的世界里 —— 至少在某些方面 —— 从来没有发生过什么事情，人类社会可以通过与黑猩猩或倭黑猩猩的队伍进行类比而得到最好的理解，他们在那里做什么？不足为奇的是，也许有些人通过完全放弃平等主义黄金时代的想法来回应，相反，他们的结论是，这一定是一个由强大的领导人，甚至是王朝主导的社会 —— 因此，自我膨胀和胁迫性权力一直是人类社会进化背后持久的力量。但这也不太行得通。

Evidence of institutional inequality in Ice Age societies, whether grand burials or monumental buildings, is sporadic. Richly costumed burials appear centuries, and often hundreds of miles, apart. Even if we put this down to the patchiness of the evidence, we still have to ask why the evidence is so patchy in the first place: after all, if any of these Ice Age ‘princes’ had behaved like, say, Bronze Age (let alone Renaissance Italian) princes, we’d also be finding all the usual trappings of centralized power: fortifications, storehouses, palaces. Instead, over tens of thousands of years, we see monuments and magnificent burials, but little else to indicate the growth of ranked societies, let alone anything remotely resembling ‘states’. To understand why the early record of human social life is patterned in this strange, staccato fashion we first have to do away with some lingering preconceptions about ‘primitive’ mentalities.

在冰河时代的社会中，无论是宏伟的墓葬还是纪念性的建筑，有关制度上的不平等的证据都是零星的。装束丰富的墓葬出现在几个世纪之后，而且往往相隔数百英里。即使我们把这归结为证据的不完整，我们仍然要问为什么证据首先是如此不完整的：毕竟，如果这些冰河时代的 “王子” 的行为像青铜时代（更不用说文艺复兴时期的意大利）的王子一样，我们也会发现所有中央集权的通常标志：防御工事、仓库、宫殿。相反，在几万年的时间里，我们看到的是纪念碑和宏伟的墓葬，但几乎没有其他东西可以表明等级社会的发展，更不用说任何与 “国家” 相近的东西。为了理解为什么人类社会生活的早期记录是以这种奇怪的、不紧不慢的方式进行的，我们首先要摒弃一些关于 “原始” 心理的挥之不去的成见。

IN WHICH WE DISPOSE OF LINGERING ASSUMPTIONS THAT ‘PRIMITIVE’ FOLK WERE SOMEHOW INCAPABLE OF CONSCIOUS REFLECTION, AND DRAW ATTENTION TO THE HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF ECCENTRICITY

其中，我们摒弃了 “原始” 民俗在某种程度上不具备有意识的反思能力这一挥之不去的假设，并提请注意怪癖的历史重要性。

In the last chapter, we suggested that the really insidious element of Rousseau’s legacy is not so much the idea of the ‘noble savage’ as that of the ‘stupid savage’. We may have got over the overt racism of most nineteenth-century Europeans, or at least we think we have, but it’s not unusual to find even very sophisticated contemporary thinkers who feel it’s more appropriate to compare ‘bands’ of hunter-gatherers with chimps or baboons than with anyone they’d ever be likely to meet. Consider the following passage from the historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014). Harari starts off with a perfectly reasonable observation: that our knowledge of early human history is extremely limited, and social arrangements probably varied a great deal from place to place. True, he overstates his case (he suggests we can really know nothing, even about the Ice Age), but the basic point is well taken. Then we get this:

在上一章中，我们提出，卢梭遗产中真正阴险的因素不是 “高贵的野蛮人”，而是 “愚蠢的野蛮人” 的想法。我们可能已经克服了大多数 19 世纪欧洲人公开的种族主义，或者至少我们认为我们已经克服了，但是，即使是非常成熟的当代思想家，也会觉得把狩猎采集者的 “部落” 与黑猩猩或狒狒相比，比与他们可能遇到的任何人相比更合适。考虑一下历史学家尤瓦尔·诺亚·哈拉里的《人类的简史》（2014）中的以下段落。哈拉里以一个完全合理的观点开始：我们对早期人类历史的了解极其有限，社会安排可能因地而异。诚然，他夸大了他的情况（他建议我们真的可以什么都不知道，甚至关于冰河时期），但基本观点是很好的。然后我们得到了这个：

The sociopolitical world of the foragers is another area about which we know next to nothing … scholars cannot even agree on the basics, such as the existence of private property, nuclear families and monogamous relationships. It’s likely that different bands had different structures. Some may have been as hierarchical, tense and violent as the nastiest chimpanzee group, while others were as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a bunch of bonobos.

觅食者的社会政治世界是另一个我们几乎一无所知的领域…… 学者们甚至不能就基本问题达成一致，例如私有财产、核心家庭和一夫一妻制的存在。很可能不同的部落有不同的结构。有些可能像最讨厌的黑猩猩群体那样等级森严、紧张和暴力，而另一些则像一群倭黑猩猩那样悠闲、和平和淫荡。

So not only was everyone living in bands until farming came along, but these bands were basically ape-like in character. If this seems unfair to the author, remember that Harari could just as easily have written ‘as tense and violent as the nastiest biker gang’, and ‘as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a hippie commune’. One might have imagined the obvious thing to compare one group of human beings with would be … another group of human beings. Why, then, did Harari choose chimps instead of bikers? It’s hard to escape the impression that the main point of difference is that bikers choose to live the way they do. Such choices imply political consciousness: the ability to argue and reflect about the proper way to live – which is precisely, as Boehm reminds us, what apes don’t do. Yet Harari, like so many others, chooses to compare early humans with apes anyway.

因此，在农业出现之前，不仅每个人都生活在族群中，而且这些族群基本上都有猿猴般的性格。如果这似乎对作者不公平，请记住，哈拉里可以很容易地写出 “像最讨厌的摩托车帮一样紧张和暴力”，以及 “像嬉皮公社一样悠闲、和平和淫荡”。人们可能会想象，将一群人与另一群人进行比较的明显事物是…… 另一群人。那么，为什么哈拉里选择黑猩猩而不是摩托车手？很难摆脱这样的印象，即主要的差异点是骑自行车的人选择以他们的方式生活。这种选择意味着政治意识：有能力争论和反思正确的生活方式 —— 正如博姆提醒我们的那样，这正是猩猩不做的事情。然而，哈拉里和其他许多人一样，还是选择了将早期人类与猿猴进行比较。

In this way, the ‘sapient paradox’ returns. Not as something real, but as a side effect of the weird way we read the evidence: insisting either that for countless millennia we had modern brains, but for some reason decided to live like monkeys anyway; or that we had the ability to overcome our simian instincts and organize ourselves in an endless variety of ways, but for some equally obscure reason only ever chose one way to organize ourselves.

这样一来，“智人悖论” 就回来了。不是作为真实的东西，而是作为我们解读证据的奇怪方式的副作用：坚持认为在无数个千年里，我们有现代的大脑，但由于某种原因决定像猴子一样生活；或者我们有能力克服我们的类人本能，以无穷无尽的方式组织自己，但由于某种同样模糊的原因，只选择一种方式来组织自己。

Perhaps the real question here is what it means to be a ‘self-conscious political actor’. Philosophers tend to define human consciousness in terms of self-awareness; neuroscientists, on the other hand, tell us we spend the overwhelming majority of our time effectively on autopilot, working out habitual forms of behaviour without any sort of conscious reflection. When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic. Ancient philosophers tended to be keenly aware of all this: that’s why, whether they were in China, India or Greece, they tended to write their books in the form of dialogues. Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem. True individual self-consciousness, meanwhile, was imagined as something that a few wise sages could perhaps achieve through long study, exercise, discipline and meditation.

也许这里真正的问题是成为 “有自我意识的政治行为者” 意味着什么。哲学家们倾向于用自我意识来定义人类的意识；另一方面，神经科学家们告诉我们，我们，绝大多数时间都是在自动驾驶中度过的，在没有任何有意识的反思的情况下形成习惯性的行为。当我们有能力进行自我意识时，通常是在非常短暂的时间内：“意识窗口”，在这期间我们可以保持一个想法或解决一个问题，往往平均开放约 7 秒。然而，神经科学家（必须说，大多数当代哲学家）几乎从未注意到的是，这一点的最大例外是当我们与他人交谈时。在谈话中，我们可以保持思考，有时可以连续几个小时思考问题。当然，这也是为什么很多时候，即使我们想自己搞清楚一些事情，我们也会想象着与别人争论或向别人解释。人类的思想本质上是对话性的。古代哲学家往往敏锐地意识到这一点：这就是为什么，无论他们是在中国、印度还是希腊，他们都倾向于以对话的形式写书。人类只有在相互争论，试图动摇对方的观点，或解决一个共同的问题时才有充分的自我意识。同时，真正的个人自我意识被想象成一些聪明的圣人通过长期的学习、锻炼、纪律和冥想也许能达到的东西。

What we’d now call political consciousness was always assumed to come first. In this sense, the Western philosophical tradition has taken a rather unusual direction over the last few centuries. Around the same time as it abandoned dialogue as its typical mode of writing, it also began imagining the isolated, rational, self-conscious individual not as a rare achievement, something typically accomplished – if at all – after literally years of living isolated in a cave or monastic cell, or on top of a pillar in a desert somewhere, but as the normal default state of human beings anywhere.

我们现在称之为政治意识的东西总是被认为是第一位的。在这个意义上，西方哲学传统在过去几个世纪中采取了一个相当不寻常的方向。大约在它放弃对话作为其典型的写作模式的同时，它也开始想象孤立的、理性的、有自我意识的个人不是一种罕见的成就，这种成就通常是在与世隔绝地生活在山洞或修道院的牢房里，或在沙漠的某个地方的柱子顶上多年后完成的，而是作为任何地方的人类的正常默认状态。

Even stranger, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was political self-consciousness that European philosophers came to see as some kind of amazing historical achievement: as a phenomenon which only really became possible with the Enlightenment itself, and the subsequent American and French Revolutions. Before that, it was assumed, people blindly followed traditions, or what they assumed to be the will of God. Even when peasants or popular rebels rose up to try to overthrow oppressive regimes they couldn’t admit they were doing so, but convinced themselves they were restoring ‘ancient customs’ or acting on some kind of divine inspiration. To Victorian intellectuals, the notion of people self-consciously imagining a social order more to their liking and then trying to bring it into being was simply not applicable before the modern age – and most were deeply divided as to whether it would even be a good idea in their own time.

更奇怪的是，在十八和十九世纪的过程中，欧洲哲学家将政治自我意识视为某种惊人的历史成就：作为一种现象，只有在启蒙运动本身，以及随后的美洲和法国革命中才真正成为可能。在此之前，人们被认为是盲目地遵循传统，或者他们认为是上帝的意志。甚至当农民或民众反叛者起来试图推翻压迫性政权时，他们也不能承认他们，而是说服自己他们是在恢复 “古老的习俗” 或根据某种神圣的灵感行事。对维多利亚时代的知识分子来说，人们自觉地想象一种更符合自己喜好的社会秩序，然后试图将其变为现实，这种概念在现代社会之前根本不适用 —— 而且大多数人对这在他们自己的时代是否是一个好主意存在很大分歧。

All this would have come as a great surprise to Kandiaronk, the seventeenth-century Wendat philosopher-statesman whose impact on European political thought we discussed in the previous chapter. Like many North American peoples of his time, Kandiaronk’s Wendat nation saw their society as a confederation created by conscious agreement; agreements open to continual renegotiation. But by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many in Europe and America had reached the point of arguing that someone like Kandiaronk could never have really existed in the first place. ‘Primitive’ folk, they argued, were not only incapable of political self-consciousness, they were not even capable of fully conscious thought on the individual level – or at least conscious thought worthy of the name. That is, just as they pretended a ‘rational Western individual’ (say, a British train guard or French colonial official) could be assumed to be fully self-aware all the time (a clearly absurd assumption), they argued that anyone classified as a ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ operated with a ‘pre-logical mentality’, or lived in a mythological dreamworld. At best, they were mindless conformists, bound in the shackles of tradition; at worst, they were incapable of fully conscious, critical thought of any kind.

所有这些对坎迪阿伦克来说都是一个巨大的惊喜，坎迪阿伦克是十七世纪温达特人的哲学家·政治家，我们在上一章讨论了他对欧洲政治思想的影响。像他那个时代的许多北美人一样，坎迪阿伦克的温达特民族认为他们的社会是一个由有意识的协议创造的联盟；这些协议可以不断地重新谈判。但到了十九世纪末和二十世纪初，欧洲和美洲的许多人已经达到了这样的程度：像坎迪阿伦克这样的人首先不可能真正存在。他们认为，“原始” 民族不仅没有政治上的自我意识，他们甚至没有能力在个人层面上进行完全自觉的思考 —— 或者至少是名副其实的自觉思考。也就是说，就像他们假装一个 “理性的西方人”（比如，英国的火车警卫或法国的殖民地官员）可以被假定为一直都有充分的自我意识（这显然是一个荒谬的假设）一样，他们认为任何被归类为 “原始人” 或 “野蛮人” 的人都以 “前逻辑心态” 运作，或者生活在一个神话般的梦境里。在最好的情况下，他们是无意识的顺从者，被传统的桎梏所束缚；在最坏的情况下，他们没有能力进行完全有意识的、任何形式的批判性思考。

Such theories might be considered the high-water mark of the reaction against the indigenous critique of European society. The ar- guments attributed to figures like Kandiaronk could be written off as simple projections of Western ‘noble savage’ fantasies, because real savages were assumed to live in an entirely different mental universe. Nowadays no reputable scholar would make such claims: everyone at least pays lip service to the psychic unity of mankind. But in practice, as we’ve seen, little has changed. Scholars still write as if those living in earlier stages of economic development, and especially those who are classified as ‘egalitarian’, can be treated as if they were literally all the same, living in some collective group-think: if human differences show up in any form – different ‘bands’ being different from each other – it is only in the same way that bands of great apes might differ. Political self-consciousness, or certainly anything we’d now call visionary politics, would have been impossible.

这种理论可能被认为是对欧洲社会的本土批判的反应的高水位标志。归因于坎迪阿伦克等人的论点可以被写成西方 “高贵的野蛮人” 幻想的简单投射，因为真正的野蛮人被认为生活在一个完全不同的精神世界中。如今，没有一个有声望的学者会提出这样的主张：每个人至少都在口头上支持人类的精神统一性。但在实践中，正如我们所看到的，几乎没有什么变化。学者们仍然在写作，好像那些生活在经济发展早期阶段的人，特别是那些被归类为 “平等主义” 的人，可以被当作他们真的都是一样的，生活在一些集体的群体思维中：如果人类的差异以任何形式出现 —— 不同的族群彼此不同，那只是以大猩猩的带子可能不同的方式。政治上的自我意识，或者当然是我们现在称之为有远见的政治的东西，本来是不可能的。

And if certain hunter-gatherers turn out not to have been living perpetually in ‘bands’ at all, but instead congregating to create grand landscape monuments, storing large quantities of preserved food and treating particular individuals like royalty, contemporary scholars are at best likely to place them in a new stage of development: they have moved up the scale from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers, a step closer to agriculture and urban civilization. But they are still caught in the same Turgot-like evolutionary straitjacket, their place in history defined by their mode of subsistence, and their role blindly to enact some abstract law of development which we understand but they do not; certainly, it rarely occurs to anyone to ask what sort of worlds they thought they were trying to create.³¹

如果某些狩猎采集者根本就不是长期生活在 “族群” 中，而是聚集在一起创造宏伟的景观纪念碑，储存大量的腌制食物，把特定的人当作皇室成员对待，那么当代学者最多可能把他们放在一个新的发展阶段：他们已经从 “简单” 的狩猎采集者上升到 “复杂” 的狩猎采集者，向农业和城市文明迈进。但他们仍然陷入了杜尔哥式的进化束缚中，他们在历史中的地位被他们的生存方式所界定，他们的角色盲目地制定一些我们理解但他们不理解的抽象的发展规律；当然，很少有人想到要问他们认为自己要创造的是什么样的世界。³¹

Now, admittedly, there have always been exceptions to this rule. Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages, and watching them argue with one another, tend to be well aware that even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as sceptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments. A few, such as the early-twentieth-century scholar Paul Radin in his 1927 book Primitive Man as Philosopher, ended up concluding that at least those he knew best – Winnebago and other Native North Americans – were actually, on average, rather more thoughtful.

现在，我承认，这条规则一直有例外。那些常年与原住民用他们自己的语言交谈，并观察他们相互争论的人类学家往往很清楚，即使是那些以猎杀大象或采集荷叶芽为生的人，也和那些以操作拖拉机、管理餐馆或主持大学系所为生的人一样，具有怀疑精神、想象力、思考力和批判分析的能力。少数人，如二十世纪初的学者保罗·雷丁在其 1927 年出版的《作为哲学家的原始人》一书中，最终得出结论，至少他最了解的人 —— 温尼贝戈人和其他北美原住民 —— 平均而言，其实更有思想。

Radin himself was considered something of an oddball by his contemporaries (he always avoided getting a proper academic job; the legend in Chicago was that when once given a teaching fellowship there, he was so intimidated before his first lecture that he immediately marched out to a nearby highway and contrived to get his leg broken by a car, then spent the rest of the term happily reading in the hospital). Perhaps not coincidentally, what really struck him about the ‘primitive’ societies he was most familiar with was their tolerance of eccentricity. This, he concluded, was simply the logical extension of that same rejection of coercion that so impressed the Jesuits in Quebec. If, he noted, a Winnebago decided that gods or spirits did not really exist and refused to perform rituals meant to appease them, or even if he declared the collective wisdom of the elders wrong and invented his own personal cosmology (and both these things did, quite regularly, happen), such a sceptic would definitely be made fun of, while his closest friends and family might worry lest the gods punish him in some way. However, it would never occur to them to punish him, or that anyone should try to force him into conformity – for instance, by blaming him for a bad hunt and therefore refusing to share food with him until he agreed to perform the usual rituals.

雷丁本人也被同时代的人认为是个怪人（他总是避免得到一份正式的学术工作；在芝加哥的传说中，当他有一次获得那里的教学奖学金时，他在第一次讲课前被吓坏了，于是他立即走到附近的公路上，想办法被车撞断了腿，然后在医院里快乐地读完了剩下的学期）。也许不是巧合，他最熟悉的 “原始” 社会真正打动他的是他们对怪异的容忍。他的结论是，这仅仅是的逻辑延伸，这种拒绝强制的做法给魁北克的耶稣会士留下了深刻印象。他指出，如果一个温尼贝戈人认为神灵并不真正存在，并拒绝举行旨在安抚他们的仪式，或者甚至如果他宣布长者的集体智慧是错误的，并发明了自己的个人宇宙观（这两件事确实经常发生），这样一个怀疑论者肯定会被取笑，而他最亲密的朋友和家人可能会担心，以免神灵以某种方式惩罚他。然而，他们永远不会想到要惩罚他，或者有人会试图强迫他服从 —— 例如，通过指责他打猎不力，因此拒绝与他分享食物，直到他同意执行通常的仪式。

There is every reason to believe that sceptics and non-conformists exist in every human society; what varies is how others react to them.³² Radin was interested in the intellectual consequences, the kind of speculative systems of thought such out-of-sync characters might create. Others have noted the political implications. It’s often people who are just slightly odd who become leaders; the truly odd can become spiritual figures, but, even more, they can and often do serve as a kind of reserve of potential talent and insight that can be called on in the event of a crisis or unprecedented turn of affairs. Thomas Beidelman, for instance, observes that among the early-twentieth-century Nuer – a cattle-keeping people of South Sudan, famous for their rejection of anything that resembled government – there were politicians and village ‘bulls’ (‘operator types’ we’d now call them) who played fast and loose with the rules, but also ‘earth priests’ who mediated local disputes, and finally prophets. The politicians were often unconventional: for instance, it was not uncommon for the local ‘bull’ actually to be a woman whose parents had declared her a man for social purposes; the priests were always outsiders to the region; but the prophet was an altogether more extreme kind of figure. He might dribble, drool, maintain a vacant stare, act like an epileptic; or engage in long but pointless tasks such as spending hours arranging shells into designs on the ground in the bush; or long periods in the wilderness; or he may even eat excrement or ashes. Prophets, as Beidelman notes, ‘may speak in tongues, go into trances, fast, balance on their head, wear feathers in their hair, be active by night rather than by day, and may perch on rooftops. Some sit with tethering pegs up their anuses.’³³ Many, too, were physically deformed. Some were cross-dressers, or given to unconventional sexual practices.

我们完全有理由相信，怀疑论者和不守规矩者存在于每个人类社会；不同的是其他人对他们的反应。³²雷丁对智力方面的后果感兴趣，即这种不合群的人物可能创造的那种推测性的思想体系。其他人则注意到政治上的影响。往往是那些稍微古怪的人成为领导者；真正古怪的人可以成为精神人物，但更多的是，他们可以而且经常作为一种潜在人才和洞察力的储备，在发生危机或前所未有的事务转变时可以被调用。例如，托马斯·贝德尔曼观察到，在二十世纪早期的努埃尔人（南苏丹的一个养牛民族，因拒绝任何类似政府的东西而闻名）中，有政治家和村里的 “公牛”（我们现在称他们为 “经营者类型”），他们玩弄规则，但也有调解地方争端的 “土牧师”，最后还有先知们。政治家往往是非常规的：例如，当地的 “公牛” 实际上是一个女人，但她的父母为了社会目的宣布她是一个男人，这种情况并不罕见；祭司总是该地区的外来者；但先知是一种更加极端的人物。他可能会滴水，流口水，保持空洞的眼神，表现得像个癫痫病人；或者从事冗长但毫无意义的工作，比如花几个小时在灌木丛中的地上把贝壳排列成图案；或者长期在旷野中工作；或者他甚至可能吃粪便或灰烬。正如贝德尔曼所指出的，“先知们可能会说方言，进入恍惚状态，禁食，在头上保持平衡，头发上戴着羽毛，在夜间而不是在白天活动，并可能栖息在屋顶上。有些人的肛门上拴着钉子，坐在那里。”³³还有许多人，身体畸形。有些人是变装者，或有非常规的性行为。

In other words, these were seriously unorthodox people. The impression one gets from the literature is that any Nuer settlement of pre-colonial times was likely to be complemented by a minor penumbra of what might be termed extreme individuals; ones who in our own society would likely be classified as anything from highly eccentric or defiantly queer to neurodivergent or mentally ill. Normally, prophets were treated with bemused respect. They were ill; but the illness was a direct consequence of being touched by God. As a result, when great calamities or unprecedented events occurred – a plague, a foreign invasion – it was among this penumbra that everyone looked for a charismatic leader appropriate to the occasion. As a result, a person who might otherwise have spent his life as something analogous to the village idiot would suddenly be found to have remarkable powers of foresight and persuasion; even to be capable of inspiring new social movements among the youth or co-ordinating elders across Nuerland to put aside their differences and mobilize around some common goal; even, sometimes, to propose entirely different visions of what Nuer society might be like.

换句话说，这些人是严重非正统的人。从文献中得到的印象是，在殖民时代之前的任何努埃尔人定居点，都可能有一个小半边天，他们可能被称为极端分子；在我们自己的社会中，他们可能被归类为从高度古怪或轻蔑的同性恋到神经失调或精神疾病的任何东西。通常情况下，预言家们会受到困惑的尊重。他们有病；但这种病是被上帝触摸的直接后果。因此，当巨大的灾难或史无前例的事件发生时 —— 瘟疫、外国入侵 —— 每个人都在这个半边天中寻找适合这个场合的有魅力的领袖。结果，一个本来可能一辈子都是类似于村里的白痴的人，突然被发现具有非凡的预见力和说服力；甚至能够在年轻人中激发新的社会运动，或者协调整个努埃尔地区的长者，让他们放下分歧，围绕一些共同的目标动员起来；甚至，有时，提出完全不同的努埃尔社会可能是什么样子的愿景。

WHAT CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS LEARNED FROM THE NAMBIKWARA ABOUT THE ROLE OF CHIEFS, AND SEASONAL VARIATIONS OF SOCIAL LIFE

克劳德·莱维·斯特劳斯从南比克瓦拉学到的关于酋长的作用和社会生活的季节性变化的内容

Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of the few mid-twentieth-century anthropologists to take seriously the idea that early humans were our intellectual equals; hence his famous argument in The Savage Mind that mythological thought, rather than representing some sort of pre-logical haze, is better conceived as a kind of ‘neolithic science’ as sophisticated as our own, just built on different principles. Less well known – but more relevant to the problems we are grappling with here – are some of his early writings on politics.

克劳德·列维·斯特劳斯是二十世纪中期少数几个认真对待早期人类与我们智力相当这一观点的人类学家之一；因此他在《野蛮人的思想》中提出了著名的论点，即神话思想，与其说是代表某种前逻辑的朦胧，不如说是一种与我们的科学一样复杂的 “新石器时代科学”，只是建立在不同的原则之上。不太为人所知 —— 但与我们在这里努力解决的问题更相关 —— 是他早期关于政治的一些著作。

In 1944, Lévi-Strauss published an essay about politics among the Nambikwara, a small population of part-time farmers, part-time foragers inhabiting a notoriously inhospitable stretch of savannah in northwest Mato Grosso, Brazil. The Nambikwara then had a reputation as extremely simple folk, given their very rudimentary material culture. For this reason, many treated them almost as a direct window on to the Palaeolithic. This, Lévi-Strauss pointed out, was a mistake. People like the Nambikwara live in the shadow of the modern state, trading with farmers and city people and sometimes hiring themselves out as labourers. Some might even be descendants of runaways from cities or plantations. Still, he noted, their ways of organizing their lives could be seen as a source of insights into more general features of the human condition, especially as these pertain to politics.

1944 年，列维·斯特劳斯发表了一篇关于 Nambikwara 的政治的文章，这是一个由兼职农民和兼职觅食者组成的小群体，居住在巴西马托格罗索省西北部一片臭名昭著的荒凉草原上。鉴于他们非常简陋的物质文化，Nambikwara 人当时被誉为极其简单的民俗。由于这个原因，许多人几乎把他们当作直接了解旧石器时代的一个窗口。莱维·斯特劳斯指出，这是个错误。像 Nambikwara 这样的人生活在现代国家的阴影下，与农民和城市人进行交易，有时还把自己雇来当工人。有些人甚至可能是来自城市或种植园的逃亡者的后代。不过，他指出，他们组织生活的方式可以被看作是对人类条件的更普遍特征的洞察力的来源，特别是当这些与政治有关的时候。

For Lévi-Strauss, what was especially instructive about the Nambikwara was that, for all that they were averse to competition (they had little wealth to compete over anyway), they did appoint chiefs to lead them. The very simplicity of the resulting arrangement, he felt, might expose ‘some basic functions’ of political life that ‘remain hidden in more complex and elaborate systems of government’. Not only was the role of the chief socially and psychologically quite similar to that of a national politician or statesman in European society, he noted, it also attracted similar personality types: people who ‘unlike most of their companions, enjoy prestige for its own sake, feel a strong appeal to responsibility, and to whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward’.³⁴

对列维·斯特劳斯来说，Nambikwara 人特别具有启发性的是，尽管他们不喜欢竞争（反正他们没有什么财富可供竞争），但他们确实任命了酋长来领导他们。他认为，这种简单的安排可能会暴露出政治生活的 “一些基本功能”，而这些功能 “在更复杂的政府系统中是隐藏的”。他指出，酋长的角色不仅在社会和心理上与欧洲社会中的国家政治家或政治家相当相似，而且还吸引了类似的人格类型：“与他们的大多数同伴不同，他们为了自己的利益而享受声望，对责任感有强烈的吸引力，而且对他们来说，公共事务的负担会带来自己的回报。³⁴

Modern politicians play the role of wheelers and dealers, brokering alliances or negotiating compromises between different constituencies or interest groups. In Nambikwara society this didn’t happen much because there weren’t really many differences in wealth or status. However, chiefs did play an analogous role, brokering between two entirely different social and ethical systems, which obtained at different times of year. Allow us to explain. In the 1940s, the Nambikwara lived in what were effectively two very different societies. During the rainy season, they occupied hilltop villages of several hundred people and practised horticulture; during the rest of the year they dispersed into small foraging bands. Chiefs made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders during the ‘nomadic adventures’ of the dry season, during which times they typically gave orders, resolved crises and behaved in what would at any other time be considered an unacceptably authoritarian manner; in the wet season, a time of much greater ease and abundance, they relied on those reputations to attract followers to settle around them in villages, where they employed only gentle persuasion and led by example to guide their followers in the construction of houses and tending of gardens. In doing so they cared for the sick and needy, mediated disputes and never imposed anything on anyone.

现代政治家扮演的是商人的角色，在不同的选区或利益集团之间斡旋结盟或谈判妥协。在 Nambikwara 社会中，这种情况并不多见，因为财富或地位的差异其实并不大。然而，酋长确实发挥了类似的作用，在两个完全不同的社会和道德体系之间进行斡旋，而这两个体系在一年中的不同时期获得。请允许我们解释一下。在 20 世纪 40 年代，Nambikwara 人实际上生活在两个非常不同的社会中。在雨季，他们占据着几百人的山顶村庄，从事园艺工作；在一年的其他时间，他们分散成小型的觅食队伍。酋长们在旱季的 “游牧冒险” 中扮演英雄领袖的角色，从而赢得或失去了他们的声誉。在旱季，他们通常发号施令，解决危机，并以，这在其他任何时候都会被认为是一种不可接受的专制方式；在雨季，一个更加轻松和丰富的时期，他们依靠这些声誉来吸引追随者在他们周围的村庄定居，他们只采用温和的劝说和以身作则的方式来指导追随者建造房屋和打理花园。在此过程中，他们关心病人和穷人，调解争端，从不对任何人强加任何东西。

How should we think about these chiefs? They were not patriarchs, Lévi-Strauss concluded; neither were they petty tyrants (even though for certain limited periods they were allowed to act as such); and there was no sense in which they were invested with mystical powers. More than anything, they resembled modern politicians operating tiny embryonic welfare states, pooling resources and doling them out to those in need. What impressed Lévi-Strauss above all was their political maturity. It was the chiefs’ skill in directing small bands of dry-season foragers, of making snap decisions in crises (crossing a river, directing a hunt) that later qualified them to play the role of mediators and diplomats in the village plaza. But in doing so they were effectively moving back and forth, each year, between what evolutionary anthropologists (in the tradition of Turgot) insist on thinking of as totally different stages of social development: from hunters and foragers to farmers and back again.

我们应该如何看待这些酋长？莱维·斯特劳斯总结说，他们不是族长；他们也不是小暴君（尽管在某些有限的时期内，他们被允许这样做）；而且在任何意义上，他们都没有被赋予神秘的力量。更重要的是，他们类似于现代的政治家，经营着微小的福利国家的雏形，汇集资源并将其分配给需要的人。最让列维·斯特劳斯印象深刻的是他们的政治成熟度。正是酋长们指挥小股旱季觅食者的技能，以及在危机中做出快速决定（渡河、指挥狩猎）的技能，使他们后来有资格在村庄广场上扮演调解人和外交官的角色。但在这样做的过程中，他们每年都在进化人类学家（按照杜尔哥的传统）坚持认为的社会发展的完全不同阶段之间来回穿梭：从猎人和觅食者到农民，然后再回来。

It was precisely this quality that made the Nambikwara chief such a peculiarly familiar political figure: the calm sophistication with which he shifted between what were in effect two different social systems, all the while balancing a sense of personal ambition with the common good. These chiefs were in every sense self-conscious political actors. And it was their flexibility and adaptability that enabled them to take such a distanced perspective on whichever system obtained at any given time.

恰恰是这种品质使南比瓜拉酋长成为一个特别熟悉的政治人物：他在实际上是两种不同的社会制度之间冷静地进行转换，同时兼顾个人野心和共同利益。这些酋长在各种意义上都是自觉的政治行为者。正是他们的灵活性和适应性，使他们能够在任何特定的时间对任何一种制度采取如此远距离的观点。

Although Lévi-Strauss went on to become the world’s most renowned anthropologist and perhaps the most famous intellectual in France, his early essay on Nambikwara leadership fell into almost instant obscurity. To this day, very few outside the field of Amazonian studies have heard of it. One reason is that in the post-war decades, Lévi-Strauss was moving in exactly the opposite direction to the rest of his discipline. Where he emphasized similarities between the lives of hunters, horticulturalists and modern industrial democracies, almost everyone else – and particularly everyone interested in foraging societies – was embracing new variations on Turgot, though with updated language and backed up by a flood of hard scientific data. Throwing away old-fashioned distinctions between ‘savagery’, ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’, which were beginning to sound a little too condescending, they settled on a new sequence, which ran from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’ to ‘chiefdoms’ to ‘states’. The culmination of this trend was the landmark Man the Hunter symposium, held at the University of Chicago in 1966. This framed hunter-gatherer studies in terms of a new discipline which its attendees proposed to call ‘behavioural ecology’, starting with rigorously quantified studies of African savannah and rainforest groups – the Kalahari San, Eastern Hadza and Mbuti Pygmies – including calorie counts, time allocation studies and all sorts of data that simply hadn’t been available to earlier researchers.

尽管列维·斯特劳斯后来成为世界上最著名的人类学家，也许是法国最著名的知识分子，但他早期关于南比瓜拉领导力的文章几乎立即陷入了沉寂。时至今日，在亚马逊研究领域之外，很少有人听说过这篇文章。其中一个原因是，在战后的几十年里，列维·斯特劳斯正朝着与他的学科其他部分完全相反的方向发展。他强调猎人、园艺家和现代工业民主国家的生活，而几乎所有其他人 —— 特别是对觅食社会感兴趣的人 —— 都在接受涂尔干的新变化，尽管使用了最新的语言，并有大量的科学数据支持。他们抛弃了老式的 “野蛮”、“未开化” 和 “文明” 之间的区别，这些区别开始听起来有点过于居高临下，他们确定了一个新的顺序，即从 “部落” 到 “酋长国” 到 “国家”。这一趋势的高潮是 1966 年在芝加哥大学举行的具有里程碑意义的 “猎人”（Man the Hunter） 研讨会。该研讨会将狩猎者·采集者的研究框定在一门新的学科上，与会者建议称之为 “行为生态学”，从对非洲草原和雨林群体 —— 卡拉哈里山人、东部哈德扎人和姆布迪俾格米人 —— 的严格量化研究开始，包括卡路里计数、时间分配研究和各种早期研究者根本没有的数据。

The new studies overlapped with a sudden upswing of popular interest in just these same African societies: for instance, the famous short films about the Kalahari Bushmen by the Marshalls (an American family of anthropologists and film-makers), which became fixtures of introductory anthropology courses and educational television across the world, along with best-selling books like Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People . Before long, it was simply assumed by almost everyone that foragers represented a separate stage of social development, that they ‘live in small groups’, ‘move around a lot’, reject any social distinctions other than those of age and gender, and resolve conflicts by ‘fission’ rather than arbitration or violence.³⁵ The fact that these African societies were, in some cases at least, refugee populations living in places no one else wanted, or that many foraging societies documented in the ethnographic record (who had by this time been largely wiped out by European settler colonialism and were thus no longer available for quantitative analysis) were nothing like this, was occasionally acknowledged. But it was rarely treated as particularly relevant. The image of tiny egalitarian bands corresponded perfectly to what those weaned on the legacy of Rousseau felt hunter-gatherers ought to have been like. Now there seemed to be hard, quantifiable scientific data (and also movies!) to back it up.

新的研究与大众对这些非洲社会的兴趣突然上升相重叠：例如，马绍尔（美洲人类学家和电影制片人家族）拍摄的关于卡拉哈里布须曼人的著名短片，成为世界各地人类学入门课程和教育电视的固定内容，同时还有科林·特恩布尔的《森林人》等畅销书。不久之后，几乎所有人都简单地认为，觅食者代表了社会发展的一个独立阶段，他们 “生活在小团体中”，“经常走动”，拒绝除年龄和性别之外的任何社会区分，并通过 “裂变” 而不是仲裁或暴力解决冲突。³⁵这些非洲社会至少在某些情况下是生活在无人问津的地方的难民人口，或者民族学记录中记载的许多觅食社会（此时已被欧洲定居者殖民主义基本消灭，因此不再可用于定量分析）与此完全不同，这一事实偶尔被承认。但它很少被视为特别相关。小小的平等主义队伍的形象完全符合那些在卢梭遗产下长大的人认为狩猎采集者应该是什么样的。现在似乎有硬的、可量化的科学数据（还有电影！）来支持它。

In this new reality, Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara were simply irrelevant. After all, in evolutionary terms they weren’t even really foragers, since they only roamed about in foraging bands for seven or eight months a year. So the apparent paradox that their larger village settlements were egalitarian while their foraging bands were anything but could be ignored, lest it tarnish this crisp new picture. The kind of political self-consciousness which seemed so self-evident in Nambikwara chiefs, let alone the wild improvisation expected of Nuer prophets, had no place in the revised framework of human social evolution.

在这个新的现实中，列维·斯特劳斯的 Nambikwara 根本无关紧要。毕竟，从进化的角度来看，他们甚至不是真正的觅食者，因为他们每年只在七八个月的时间里带着觅食队伍四处游荡。因此，他们较大的村庄定居点是平等主义的，而他们的觅食队却什么都不是，这种明显的矛盾可以忽略不计，以免它玷污了这幅清晰的新画。在 Nambikwara 酋长身上似乎不言而喻的那种政治自觉，更不用说努尔族先知们所期望的疯狂的即兴创作了，在人类社会进化的修订框架中没有位置。

IN WHICH WE RETURN TO PREHISTORY, AND CONSIDER EVIDENCE FOR BOTH ‘EXTREME INDIVIDUALS’ AND SEASONAL VARIATIONS OF SOCIAL LIFE IN THE ICE AGE AND BEYOND

其中，我们回到史前时代，并考虑冰河时代及以后社会生活的 “极端个体” 和季节性变化的证据。

The twentieth-century Nambikwara, Winnebago or Nuer cannot provide us with direct windows on the past. What they can do is suggest angles of investigation we might not otherwise have thought to look for. After considering their social systems, it seems self-evident to ask if, in early human societies, there is evidence for seasonal variations of social structure; or if highly anomalous individuals were not only treated with respect, but played important political roles in the Palaeolithic period. As it turns out, the answer in both cases is ‘yes’. In fact, the evidence is overwhelming.

二十世纪的 Nambikwara、Winnebago 或 Nuer 不能为我们提供了解过去的直接窗口。他们能做的是提出我们可能没有想到要去寻找的调查角度。在考虑了他们的社会体系之后，似乎不言而喻地要问，在早期人类社会中，是否有证据表明社会结构的季节性变化；或者高度反常的个人是否不仅受到尊重，而且在旧石器时代发挥了重要的政治作用。事实证明，这两种情况下的答案都是 “是”。事实上，证据是压倒性的。

Let’s return to those rich Upper Palaeolithic burials, so often interpreted as evidence for the emergence of ‘inequality’, or even hereditary nobility of some sort. For some odd reason, those who make such arguments never seem to notice – or, if they do, to attach much significance to the fact – that a quite remarkable number of these skeletons (indeed, a majority) bear evidence of striking physical anomalies that could only have marked them out, clearly and dramatically, from their social surroundings.³⁶ The adolescent boys in both Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice, for instance, had pronounced congenital deformities; the bodies in the Romito Cave in Calabria were unusually short, with at least one case of dwarfism; while those in Grimaldi Cave were extremely tall even by our standards, and must have seemed veritable giants to their contemporaries.

让我们回到那些丰富的旧石器时代的墓葬，它们经常被解释为 “不平等” 的证据，甚至是某种世袭贵族的出现。出于某种奇怪的原因，那些提出这种论点的人似乎从来没有注意到 —— 或者说，如果他们注意到了，也没有对这一事实给予多大的重视 —— 这些骨骼中有相当多的（实际上是大多数）带有惊人的身体异常的证据，这只能将他们从他们的社会环境中清楚地、戏剧性地标出来。³⁶例如，Sunghir 和 Dolní Věstonice 的青少年男孩都有明显的先天性畸形；卡拉布里亚 Romito 洞的，尸体异常矮小，至少有一例侏儒症；而 Grimaldi 洞的尸体即使按照我们的标准也是非常高的，对他们同时代的人来说一定是名副其实的巨人。

All this seems very unlikely to be a coincidence. In fact, it makes one wonder whether even those bodies, which appear from their skeletal remains to be anatomically typical, might have been equally striking in some other way; after all, an albino, for example, or an epileptic prophet given to dividing his time between hanging upside down and arranging and rearranging snail shells would not be identifiable as such from the archaeological record. We can’t know much about the day-to-day lives of Palaeolithic individuals buried with rich grave goods, other than that they seem to have been as well fed and cared for as anybody else; but we can at least suggest they were seen as the ultimate individuals, about as different from their peers as it was possible to be.

所有这些似乎都不太可能是一个巧合。事实上，这不禁让人怀疑，即使是那些从骨骼上看是典型的尸体，也可能在其他方面同样引人注目；毕竟，一个白化病患者，或者一个癫痫的先知，在倒吊和摆放蜗牛壳之间分配时间，从考古记录中是无法确定的。我们无法了解与丰富的墓葬物品埋在一起的旧石器时代的人的日常生活，除了他们似乎和其他人一样得到了很好的食物和照顾；但我们至少可以表明，他们被视为最终的个人，与他们的同龄人有可能的不同。

What does all this really tell us about social inequality in the last Ice Age? Well, first of all it suggests we might have to shelve any premature talk of the emergence of hereditary elites. It seems extremely unlikely that Palaeolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants and dwarfs. Second, we don’t know how much the treatment of such individuals after death had to do with their treatment in life. Another important point here is that we are not dealing with a case of some people being buried with rich grave goods and others being buried with none. Rather it is a case of some people being buried with rich grave goods, and most others not being buried at all.³⁷ The very practice of burying bodies intact, and clothed, appears to have been exceptional in the Upper Palaeolithic. Most corpses were treated in completely different ways: de-fleshed, broken up, curated, or even processed into jewellery and artefacts. (In general, Palaeolithic people were clearly much more at home with human body parts than we are.)

所有这一切到底告诉我们关于最后一个冰河时代的社会不平等是什么？首先，它表明我们可能要搁置任何关于世袭精英出现的过早讨论。旧石器时代的欧洲似乎不太可能产生一个分层的精英阶层，而这个精英阶层恰好主要由驼背、巨人和侏儒组成。其次，我们不知道这些人死后的待遇与他们生前的待遇有多大关系。这里的另一个重要问题是，我们处理的不是一些人被埋葬时有丰富的墓葬物品，而另一些人被埋葬时没有。相反，这是一个有些人被埋葬在丰富的墓穴中，而其他大多数人根本就没有被埋葬。³⁷在旧石器时代上部，完整地埋葬尸体和穿上衣服的做法似乎是一种例外。大多数尸体的处理方式是完全不同的：去肉、打碎、策划，甚至加工成珠宝和工艺品。（总的来说，旧石器时代的人显然比我们更善于处理人体器官。）

The corpse in its complete and articulated form – and the clothed corpse even more so – was clearly something unusual and, one would presume, inherently strange. Some important circumstantial evidence reinforces this. In many such cases, an effort was made to contain the bodies of the Upper Palaeolithic dead by covering them with heavy objects: mammoth scapulae, wooden planks, stones or tight bindings. Perhaps saturating them with clothing, weapons and ornaments was an extension of these concerns, celebrating but also containing something potentially dangerous. This too makes sense. The ethnographic record abounds with examples of anomalous beings – human or otherwise – treated as both exalted and dangerous; or one way in life, another in death.

完整的、有关节的尸体 —— 有衣服的尸体更是如此 —— 显然是不寻常的东西，而且，人们推测，它本身就很奇怪。一些重要的间接证据加强了这一点。在许多这样的情况下，人们努力用重物覆盖上旧石器时代死者的尸体：猛犸象的肩胛骨、木板、石头或紧紧的捆绑。也许用衣服、武器和装饰品填充他们是这些关注的延伸，庆祝但也包含一些潜在的危险。这也是有道理的。民族志中有很多关于异常生物 —— 人类或其他生物 —— 被视为既高尚又危险的例子；或者生前是这样，死后又是那样。

Much here is speculation. There are any number of other interpretations that could be placed on the evidence – though the idea that these tombs mark the emergence of some sort of hereditary aristocracy seems the least likely of all. Those interred were extraordinary, ‘extreme’ individuals. The way they were treated – and here we are speaking not only about the ostentatious display of riches, but that their corpses were decorated, displayed and buried to begin with – marked them out as equally extraordinary in death. Anomalous in almost every respect, such burials can hardly be interpreted as proxies for social structure among the living. On the other hand, they clearly have something to do with all the contemporary evidence for music, sculpture, painting and complex architecture. What is one to make of them?

这里有很多是猜测。有许多其他的解释可以放在这些证据上 —— 尽管这些坟墓标志着某种世袭贵族的出现的想法似乎是最不可能的。那些被埋葬的人是不寻常的、“极端的” 个人。他们被对待的方式 —— 这里我们说的不仅是炫耀性的财富展示，而且他们的尸体一开始就被装饰、展示和埋葬 —— 标志着他们在死后也同样不寻常。在几乎所有方面都很反常的情况下，这样的墓葬很难被解释为活人中社会结构的代用品。另一方面，它们显然与所有当代音乐、雕塑、绘画和复杂建筑的证据有关。我们该如何看待它们呢？

This is where seasonality comes into the picture.

这就是季节性问题的体现。

Almost all the Ice Age sites with extraordinary burials and monumental architecture were created by societies that lived a little like Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara, dispersing into foraging bands at one time of year, gathering together in concentrated settlements at another. True, they didn’t gather to plant crops. Rather, the large Upper Palaeolithic sites are linked to migrations and seasonal hunting of game herds – woolly mammoth, steppe bison or reindeer – as well as cyclical fish-runs and nut harvests. This seems to be the explanation for those hubs of activity found in eastern Europe at places like Dolní Věstonice, where people took advantage of an abundance of wild resources to feast, engage in complex rituals and ambitious artistic projects, and trade minerals, marine shells and furs. In western Europe, equivalents would be the great rock shelters of the French Périgord and the Cantabrian coast, with their deep records of human activity, which similarly formed part of an annual round of seasonal congregation and dispersal.³⁸

几乎所有具有非凡的墓葬和纪念性建筑的冰河时代遗址都是由有点像列维·斯特劳斯的 Nambikwara 的社会创造的，他们在一年中的某个时候分散成觅食队，在另一个时候聚集在集中的定居点里。诚然，他们并没有聚集在一起种植庄稼。相反，大型的上旧石器时代遗址与迁移和季节性的猎物群 —— 长毛象、草原野牛或驯鹿 —— 以及周期性的跑鱼和坚果收获有关。这似乎是对东欧 Dolní Věstonice 等地发现的那些活动中心的解释，在那里，人们利用丰富的野生资源大吃大喝，举行复杂的仪式和雄心勃勃的艺术项目，并交易矿物、海洋贝壳和毛皮。在西欧，与之对应的是法国佩里戈尔和坎塔布里亚海岸的大型岩穴，它们对人类活动有着深刻的记录，同样构成了每年一轮的季节性聚集和分散的一部分。³⁸

Archaeology also shows that patterns of seasonal variation lie behind the monuments of Göbekli Tepe. Activities around the stone temples correspond with periods of annual superabundance, between midsummer and autumn, when large herds of gazelle descended on to the Harran Plain. At such times, people also gathered at the site to process massive quantities of nuts and wild cereal grasses, making these into festive foods, which presumably fuelled the work of construction.³⁹ There is some evidence to suggest that each of these great structures had a relatively short lifespan, culminating in an enormous feast, after which its walls were rapidly filled in with leftovers and other refuse: hierarchies raised to the sky, only to be swiftly torn down again. Ongoing research is likely to complicate this picture, but the overall pattern of seasonal congregation for festive labour seems well established.

考古学还表明，季节性变化的模式隐藏在戈拜克利特佩的遗迹背后。石庙周围的活动，与每年仲夏和秋季的丰收期相吻合，这时大量的羚羊群来到了哈兰平原。在这种时候，人们也会聚集在现场，加工大量的坚果和野生谷草，将其制成节日食品，这大概是建筑工作的燃料。³⁹有一些证据表明，这些伟大的建筑都有一个相对较短的寿命，在一次巨大的盛宴中达到顶峰，之后其墙壁迅速被剩菜和其他垃圾填满：等级制度被提升到了天上，只是很快又被拆掉了。正在进行的研究可能会使这一情况复杂化，但节日劳动的季节性聚集的总体模式似乎已经确立。

Such oscillating patterns of life endured long after the invention of agriculture. To take just one example, they may be key to understanding the famous Neolithic monuments of Salisbury Plain in England, and not just because the arrangements of standing stones themselves seem to function (among other things) as giant calendars. Stonehenge, framing the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset, is the most famous of these. It turns out to have been the last in a long sequence of ceremonial structures, erected over the course of centuries in timber as well as stone, as people converged on the plain from remote corners of the British Isles at significant times of year. Careful excavation shows that many of these structures – now plausibly interpreted as monuments to the ancestors of a Neolithic aristocracy – were dismantled just a few generations after their construction.⁴⁰

这种振荡的生活模式在农业发明后长期存在。仅举一例，它们可能是理解英格兰索尔兹伯里平原上著名的新石器时代纪念碑的关键，而不仅仅是因为立石的排列本身似乎具有巨大的日历功能（除其他外）。巨石阵是其中最著名的，它将仲夏的日出和仲冬的日落定格在一起。事实证明，它是一长串仪式建筑中的最后一个，是在几个世纪的时间里用木材和石头建造的，因为人们在一年中的重要时刻从不列颠群岛的偏远角落聚集在平原上。仔细的挖掘表明，这些建筑中的许多 —— 现在可以解释为新石器时代贵族祖先的纪念碑 —— 在建成后的几代人中就被拆除了。⁴⁰

Still more striking, the people who built Stonehenge were not farmers, or not in the usual sense. They had once been; but the practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the peoples of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it: abandoning the cultivation of cereals and returning, from around 3300 BC, to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food. On the other hand, they kept hold of their domestic pigs and herds of cattle, feasting on them seasonally at nearby Durrington Walls, a prosperous town of some thousands of people – with its own Woodhenge – in winter, but largely empty and abandoned in summer. The builders of Stonehenge seem to have been neither foragers nor herders, but something in between.⁴¹

更引人注目的是，建造巨石阵的人不是农民，或者说不是通常意义上的农民。他们曾经是农民；但在竖立和拆除宏伟纪念碑的过程中，英国人从欧洲大陆采用了新石器时代的农业经济，似乎至少在一个关键方面背弃了它：放弃了谷物的种植，从公元前 3300 年左右开始，回归到采集榛子作为其主要的植物食物来源。另一方面，他们保留了他们的家猪和牛群，在附近的 Durrington Walls 季节性地享用它们，Durrington Walls 是一个繁荣的城镇，冬天有几千人，有自己的 Woodhenge，但在夏天基本上是空的，被遗弃的。巨石阵的建造者似乎既不是觅食者也不是牧民，而是介于两者之间的人。⁴¹

All this is crucial because it’s hard to imagine how giving up agriculture could have been anything but a self-conscious decision. There is no evidence that one population displaced another, or that farmers were somehow overwhelmed by powerful foragers who forced them to abandon their crops. The Neolithic inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal-farming and collectively decided that they preferred to live another way. How could such a decision have been made? We’ll never know, but Stonehenge itself provides something of a hint since it is built of extremely large stones, some of which (the ‘bluestones’) were transported from as far away as Wales, while many of the cattle and pigs consumed at Durrington Walls were laboriously herded there from other distant locations.⁴²

这一切都很关键，因为很难想象放弃农业除了是一个自觉的决定外，还能有什么其他原因。没有证据表明一个人口取代了另一个人口，也没有证据表明农民在某种程度上被强大的觅食者压倒，迫使他们放弃他们的作物。英格兰的新石器时代居民似乎已经衡量了谷物种植，并集体决定他们更愿意以另一种方式生活。这样的决定是如何做出的？我们永远不会知道，但巨石阵本身提供了一些提示，因为它是由非常大的石头建成的，其中一些石头（“蓝石”）是从远在威尔士的地方运来的，而杜林顿墙所消费的许多牛和猪都是从其他遥远的地方辛苦地赶来的。⁴²

In other words, and remarkable as it may seem, even in the third millennium BC co-ordination of some sort was clearly possible across large parts of the British Isles. If Stonehenge was a shrine to exalted founders of a ruling clan – as some archaeologists now argue – it seems likely that members of their lineage claimed significant, even cosmic roles by virtue of their involvement in such events. On the other hand, patterns of seasonal aggregation and dispersal raise another question: if there were kings and queens at Stonehenge, exactly what sort could they have been? After all, these would have been kings whose courts and kingdoms existed for only a few months of the year, and otherwise dispersed into small communities of nut gatherers and stock herders. If they possessed the means to marshal labour, pile up food resources and provender armies of year-round retainers, what sort of royalty would consciously elect not to do so?

换句话说，尽管看起来很了不起，但即使在公元前 3000 年，在不列颠群岛的大部分地区，某种形式的协调显然是可能的。如果巨石阵是一个统治氏族的崇高创始人的圣地 —— 正如一些考古学家现在所认为的那样 —— 那么他们的家族成员似乎有可能因为参与了这些活动而声称自己扮演了重要的甚至是通用的角色。另一方面，季节性聚集和分散的模式提出了另一个问题：如果巨石阵有国王和王后，他们到底是哪种人？毕竟，这些国王的宫廷和王国在一年中只存在几个月，否则就会分散到坚果采集者和牧民的小社区中。如果他们拥有调集劳动力、堆积食物资源和供养全年的家臣军队的手段，什么样的王室会有意识地选择不这样做？

CONCERNING ‘BUFFALO POLICE’ (IN WHICH WE REDISCOVER THE ROLE OF SEASONALITY IN HUMAN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL LIFE)

关于 “水牛警察”（其中我们重新发现了季节性在人类社会和政治生活中的作用）。

Recall that for Lévi-Strauss, there was a clear link between seasonal variations of social structure and a certain kind of political freedom. The fact that one structure applied in the rainy season and another in the dry allowed Nambikwara chiefs to view their own social arrangements at one remove: to see them as not simply ‘given’, in the natural order of things, but as something at least partially open to human intervention. The case of the British Neolithic – with its alternating phases of dispersal and monumental construction – indicates just how far such intervention could sometimes go.

回顾一下，对列维·斯特劳斯来说，社会结构的季节性变化与某种政治自由之间存在着明确的联系。一种结构适用于雨季，另一种结构适用于旱季，这一事实使南比瓜拉酋长能够从一个角度看待他们自己的社会 ：把它们看作不是简单的 “给定”，在事物的自然秩序中，而是至少部分地对人类干预开放的东西。英国新石器时代的情况 —— 其分散和纪念碑建设的交替阶段 —— 表明这种干预有时可以走多远。

Writing in the midst of the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss probably didn’t think he was saying anything all that extraordinary. For anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century, it was common knowledge that societies doing a great deal of hunting, herding or foraging were often arranged in such a ‘double morphology’ (as Lévi-Strauss’s great predecessor Marcel Mauss put it).⁴³ Lévi-Strauss was simply highlighting some of the political implications. But these implications are important. What the existence of similar seasonal patterns in the Palaeolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. It might be useful here to look back at this forgotten anthropological literature, with which Lévi-Strauss would have been intimately familiar, to get a sense of just how dramatic these seasonal differences might be.

莱维·斯特劳斯在第二次世界大战期间写作时，可能并不认为他说的是什么特别的东西。对于 20 世纪上半叶的人类学家来说，从事大量狩猎、放牧或觅食的社会往往被安排在这样一个 “双重形态” 中（正如列维·斯特劳斯的伟大前辈马塞尔·莫斯所说），这是一个常识。⁴³列维·斯特劳斯只是强调了一些政治含义。但这些影响是重要的。旧石器时代类似的季节性模式的存在表明，从一开始，或者至少从我们可以追溯到这种事情开始，人类就在自觉地试验不同的社会可能性。在这里，回顾一下这些被遗忘的人类学文献可能是有益的，列维·斯特劳斯会非常熟悉这些文献，以了解这些季节性的差异可能有多大。

The key text here is Marcel Mauss and Henri Beuchat’s (1903) ‘Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo’. The authors begin by observing that the circumpolar Inuit ‘and likewise many other societies … have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer, Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single male elder. During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin – much more so than the Nambikwara chiefs in the dry season. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. Then, Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Sea.⁴⁴

这里的关键文本是马塞尔·莫斯和亨利·博沙特（1903）的《爱斯基摩人的季节性变化》。作者一开始就指出，环北极的因纽特人 “和许多其他社会一样…… 有两个社会结构，一个在夏天，一个在冬天，同时他们有两个法律和宗教体系”。在夏季，因纽特人分散成大约 20 或 30 人的队伍，去追逐淡水鱼、驯鹿和驯鹿，所有这些都在一个男性长老的领导下。在这一时期，财产具有占有性，族长对他们的亲属行使强制力，有时甚至是暴虐的权力 —— 在旱季比南比克瓦拉酋长的权力更大。但在漫长的冬季，当海豹和海象涌向北极岸边时，情况发生了戏剧性的逆转。然后，因纽特人聚集在一起，用木头、鲸鱼肋骨和石头建造巨大的会议厅；在这些会议厅里，平等、利他主义和集体生活的美德盛行。财富被分享，丈夫和妻子在海洋女神塞德娜的主持下交换伴侣。⁴⁴

Mauss thought the Inuit were an ideal case study because, living in the Arctic, they were facing some of the most extreme environmental constraints it was possible to endure. Yet even in sub-Arctic conditions, Mauss calculated, physical considerations – availability of game, building materials and the like – explained at best 40 per cent of the picture. (Other circumpolar peoples, he noted, including close neighbours of the Inuit facing near-identical physical conditions, organized themselves quite differently.) To a large extent, he concluded, Inuit lived the way they did because they felt that’s how humans ought to live.

莫斯认为因纽特人是一个理想的案例研究，因为他们生活在北极地区，面临着一些可能忍受的最极端的环境限制。然而，根据莫斯的计算，即使在亚北极地区的条件下，物理因素 —— 猎物、建筑材料等的可用性 —— 最多能解释 40% 的情况。（他指出，其他环北极地区的民族，包括因纽特人的近邻，面对几乎相同的物理条件，他们的组织方式却截然不同。）他总结说，在很大程度上，因纽特人以他们的方式生活，因为他们认为人类应该这样生活。

Around the same time that Marcel Mauss was combing French libraries for everything that had ever been written about the Inuit, the German ethnologist Franz Boas was carrying out research on the Kwakiutl, indigenous hunter-gatherers of Canada’s Northwest Coast. Here, Boas discovered, it was winter – not summer – that was the time when society crystallized into its most hierarchical forms, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastline of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over compatriots classified as commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch . Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations – still ranked, but with entirely different and much less formal structures. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter – literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year.⁴⁵

大约就在马塞尔·莫斯在法国图书馆里搜寻所有关于因纽特人的文献的同时，德国民族学家弗朗茨·博斯正在对加拿大西北海岸的原住民狩猎采集者 Kwakiutl 进行研究。博厄斯发现，在这里，冬季 —— 而不是夏季 —— 是社会结晶为最有等级的形式的时候，而且非常壮观。在不列颠哥伦比亚省的海岸线上，由木板搭建的宫殿焕发出勃勃生机，世袭的贵族们对被归类为平民和奴隶的同胞们进行审判，并举办被称为 potlatch 的盛大宴会。然而，这些贵族法庭在夏季捕鱼季节的工作中分崩离析，恢复到较小的宗族形式 —— 仍然有等级，但结构完全不同，也不那么正式。在这种情况下，人们实际上在夏季和冬季采用不同的名字 —— 根据一年中的不同时间，实际上变成了另一个人。⁴⁵

Emigrating to the US, Boas went on to become a professor at New York’s Columbia University, where he ended up training virtually everyone who was to make a name for themselves in American anthropology for the next half-century. One of his students, a Viennese-born ethnographer named Robert Lowie (who was also a close friend of Paul Radin, author of Primitive Man as Philosopher) did fieldwork among the Mandan-Hidatsa and Crow people of what are now Montana and Wyoming, and spent much of his career thinking through the political implications of seasonal variation among nineteenth-century tribal confederacies on the Great Plains.

移民到美洲后，博厄斯成为纽约哥伦比亚大学的教授，在那里，他几乎培养了接下来半个世纪里在美洲人类学界成名的所有人。他的学生之一，一位出生在维也纳的民族学家罗伯特·洛维（他也是《作为哲学家的原始人》的作者保罗·雷丁的密友）在现在的蒙大拿州和怀俄明州的曼丹·希达萨人和克罗人中进行实地考察，并在其职业生涯的大部分时间里思考大平原上 19 世纪部落联盟的季节性变化的政治含义。

Plains nations were one-time farmers who had largely abandoned cereal agriculture, after re-domesticating escaped Spanish horses and adopting a largely nomadic mode of life. In late summer and early autumn, small and highly mobile bands of Cheyenne and Lakota would congregate in large settlements to make logistical preparations for the buffalo hunt. At this most sensitive time of year they appointed a police force that exercised full coercive powers, including the right to imprison, whip or fine any offender who endangered the proceedings. Yet, as Lowie observed, this ‘unequivocal authoritarianism’ operated on a strictly seasonal and temporary basis. Once the hunting season – and the collective Sun Dance rituals that followed – were complete, such authoritarianism gave way to what he called ‘anarchic’ forms of organization, society splitting once again into small, mobile bands. Lowie’s observations are startling:

平原民族曾经是农民，在重新驯养逃亡的西班牙马匹并采取主要是游牧的生活方式后，他们基本上放弃了谷物农业。在夏末秋初，夏安人和拉科塔人的小型和高度流动的队伍，他们会聚集在大型定居点，为水牛狩猎做后勤准备。在这一年中最敏感的时刻，他们任命了一支警察部队，行使充分的强制权力，包括有权监禁、鞭打或罚款任何危及诉讼的罪犯。然而，正如洛维所观察到的，这种 “明确的威权主义” 是在严格的季节性和临时性基础上运作的。一旦狩猎季节 —— 以及随后的集体太阳舞仪式 —— 结束，这种专制主义就会让位于他所说的 “无政府” 的组织形式，社会再次分裂成小型的、流动的团体。洛伊的观察令人吃惊。

In order to ensure a maximum kill, a police force – either coinciding with a military club, or appointed ad hoc, or serving by virtue of clan affiliation – issued orders and restrained the disobedient. In most of the tribes they not only confiscated game clandestinely procured, but whipped the offender, destroyed his property, and, in case of resistance, killed him. The very same organisation which in a murder case would merely use moral suasion turned into an inexorable State agency during a buffalo drive. However … coercive measures extended considerably beyond the hunt: the soldiers also forcibly restrained braves intent on starting war parties that were deemed inopportune by the chief; directed mass migrations; supervised the crowds at a major festival; and might otherwise maintain law and order.⁴⁶

为了确保最大限度的杀戮，一支警察部队 —— 或者与一个军事俱乐部同时存在，或者临时任命，或者凭借部族关系而服务 —— 发布命令，约束不听话的人。在大多数部落中，他们不仅没收秘密购买的猎物，而且还鞭打罪犯，毁坏其财产，在反抗的情况下将其杀死。在谋杀案中仅仅使用道德劝说的同一个组织，在驱赶水牛的过程中变成了一个不可阻挡的国家机构。然而…… 强制措施远远超出了狩猎的范围：士兵们还强行约束那些打算发动酋长认为不合适的战队的勇士们；指挥大规模的迁徙；监督重大节日的人群；并可能以其他方式维持法律和秩序。⁴⁶

‘During a large part of the year,’ Lowie continued, ‘the tribe simply did not exist as such; and the families or minor unions of familiars that jointly sought a living required no special disciplinary organization. The soldiers were thus a concomitant of numerically strong aggregations, hence functioned intermittently rather than continuously.’ But the soldiers’ sovereignty, he stressed, was no less real for its temporary nature. As a result, Lowie insisted that Plains Indians did in fact know something of state power, even though they never actually developed a state.

“在一年中的大部分时间里”，洛维继续说，“部落根本不存在；而共同谋生的家庭或家族成员的小联盟不需要特别的纪律组织。因此，士兵是人数众多的群体的伴随物，因此，他们的功能是间歇性的，而不是持续性的。” 但他强调，士兵们的主权并没有因为其临时性而变得不真实。因此，洛维坚持认为，平原印第安人实际上对国家权力有所了解，尽管他们实际上从未发展出一个国家。

It’s easy to see why the neo-evolutionists of the 1950s and 1960s might not have known quite what to do with this legacy of fieldwork observations. They were arguing for the existence of discrete stages of political organization – successively: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states – and held that the stages of political development mapped, at least very roughly, on to similar stages of economic development: hunter-gatherers, gardeners, farmers, industrial civilization. It was confusing enough that people like the Nambikwara seemed to jump back and forth, over the course of the year, between economic categories. The Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine or Lakota would appear to jump regularly from one end of the political spectrum to the other. They were a kind of band/state amalgam. In other words, they threw everything askew.

很容易理解为什么 20 世纪 50 年代和 60 年代的新进化论者可能不知道该如何处理这些实地观察的遗产。他们主张政治组织存在不连续的阶段 —— 依次为：部落、部落、酋长国、国家 —— 并认为政治发展的阶段与经济发展的类似阶段相吻合，至少是非常。像南比克瓦拉人这样的人在一年中似乎在经济类别之间来回跳动，这已经很令人困惑了。夏安人、克罗人、阿西尼博因人或拉科塔人似乎经常从政治光谱的一端跳到另一端。他们是一种族群/国家的混合体。换句话说，他们把一切都搞乱了。

Still, Lowie is absolutely unequivocal on this point, and he was by no means the only anthropologist to observe it.⁴⁷ Most interestingly for our own perspective, he too stressed that the Plains Indians were conscious political actors, keenly aware of the possibilities and dangers of authoritarian power. Not only did they dismantle all means of exercising coercive authority the moment the ritual season was over, they were also careful to rotate which clan or warrior clubs got to wield it: anyone holding sovereignty one year would be subject to the authority of others in the next.⁴⁸

不过，洛维在这一点上是绝对明确的，而且他也绝不是唯一观察到这一点的人类学家。⁴⁷对我们自己的观点来说，最有趣的是，他也强调平原印第安人是有意识的政治行为者，敏锐地意识到专制权力的可能性和危险性。他们不仅在祭祀季节结束时拆除所有行使强制权力的手段，而且还小心翼翼地轮流让哪个部族或战士俱乐部来行使权力：任何一年拥有主权的人在下一年都要服从其他人的权力。⁴⁸

Scholarship does not always advance. Sometimes it slips backwards. A hundred years ago, most social scientists understood that those who live mainly from wild resources were not normally restricted to tiny ‘bands’. As we’ve seen, the assumption that they were only gained ground in the 1960s. In this regard, our earlier invocation of biker gangs and hippie communes wasn’t entirely whimsical. These were the images being bounced around in the popular imagination at that time, and invoked in debates about human nature. It’s surely no coincidence that the most popular ethnographic films of the post-war era either focused on the Kalahari Bushmen and Mbuti Pygmies (‘band’ societies, which could be imagined as roughly resembling hippie communes); or on the Yanomami or ‘fierce people’ (Amazonian horticulturalists who, in Napoleon Chagnon’s version of reality – but not, let’s recall, in Helena Valero’s – do bear a rather disturbing resemblance to Hell’s Angels).

学术研究并不总是进步。有时，它也会向后滑落。一百年前，大多数社会科学家都明白，那些主要靠野生资源为生的人通常不会被限制在很小的 “族群” 里。正如我们所看到的，他们的假设只是在 20 世纪 60 年代得到了支持。在这一点上，我们早先提到的骑自行车的团伙和嬉皮公社并不完全是异想天开。这些都是当时在大众想象中的形象，并在关于人性的辩论中被引用。战后最流行的人种学电影要么关注卡拉哈里布什曼人和姆布迪俾格米人（“族群” 社会，可以想象为与嬉皮公社大致相似），这当然不是巧合。或亚诺马米人或 “凶猛的人”（亚马逊园艺家，在拿破仑·查尼翁的现实版本中 —— 但不是，让我们回顾一下，在海伦娜·瓦莱罗的版本中 —— 确实与地狱天使有着相当令人不安的相似之处）。

Since in this new, evolutionist narrative ‘states’ were defined above all by their monopoly on the ‘legitimate use of coercive force’, the nineteenth-century Cheyenne or Lakota would have been seen as evolving from the ‘band’ level to the ‘state’ level roughly every November, and then devolving back again come spring. Obviously, this is silly. No one would seriously suggest such a thing. Still, it’s worth pointing out because it exposes the much deeper silliness of the initial assumption: that societies must necessarily progress through a series of evolutionary stages to begin with. You can’t speak of an evolution from band to tribe to chiefdom to state if your starting points are groups that move fluidly between them as a matter of habit.

由于在这种新的、进化论的叙述中，“国家” 首先被定义为对 “合法使用强制力” 的垄断，所以十九世纪的夏安人或拉科塔人将被视为大致在每年 11 月从 “部落” 一级进化到 “国家” 一级，然后在春天到来时再次演变回来。很明显，这是愚蠢的。没有人会认真建议这样的事情。但是，这仍然值得指出，因为它暴露了最初假设的更深层次的愚蠢：社会必须通过一系列的进化阶段来开始进步。如果你的出发点是作为一种习惯在它们之间流动的群体，那么你就不能说从族群到部落到酋长国的进化。

Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos more recent efforts at classifying hunter-gatherers into either ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ types, since what have been identified as the diagnostic features of ‘complexity’ – territoriality, social ranks, material wealth or competitive display – appear during certain seasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact same population. Admittedly, most professional anthropologists nowadays have come to recognize that these categories are hopelessly inadequate, but the main effect of this acknowledgement has just been to cause them to change the subject, or suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t really be thinking about the broad sweep of human history at all any more. Nobody has yet proposed an alternative.

季节二元论也使最近将狩猎采集者分为 “简单” 或 “复杂” 类型的努力陷入混乱，因为那些被确定为 “复杂” 的诊断特征 —— 领地性、社会等级、物质财富或竞争展示 —— 在一年中的某些季节出现，而在其他季节却被完全相同的人群抛之脑后。诚然，如今大多数专业人类学家已经认识到这些分类是无可救药的，但这种承认的主要效果只是使他们改变了主题，或者暗示我们也许真的不应该再去思考人类历史的广泛性了。还没有人提出一个替代方案。

Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like the Inuit, Nambikwara or Crow. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them – all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states.

同时，正如我们所看到的，考古证据堆积如山，表明在最后一个冰河时代的高度季节性环境中，我们的遥远祖先的行为很像因纽特人、南比瓜拉人或克罗人。他们在不同的社会安排之间来回转换，建造纪念碑，然后再关闭，允许在一年中的某些时间里兴起专制结构，然后再拆除它们 —— 所有这些，似乎都是基于这样的理解，即没有特定的社会秩序是固定的或不可改变的。同一个人可以在我们看来有时像一个族群，有时像一个部落，有时像至少有一些我们现在认为是国家的特征的东西中体验生活。

With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given structure and reflect; to both make and unmake the political worlds we live in. If nothing else, this explains the ‘princes’ and ‘princesses’ of the last Ice Age, who appear to show up, in such magnificent isolation, like characters in some kind of fairy tale or costume drama. Maybe they were almost literally so. If they reigned at all, then perhaps it was, like the ruling clans of Stonehenge, just for a season.⁴⁹

有了这种体制上的灵活性，就有能力跳出任何特定结构的界限，进行反思；创造和解除我们生活的政治世界。如果不出意外，这就解释了上个冰河时代的 “王子” 和 “公主”，他们似乎出现了，在如此宏伟的孤立中，就像某种童话或古装剧中的人物。也许他们几乎就是这样。如果他们有统治权，那么也许就像巨石阵的统治家族一样，只是一个季节。⁴⁹

WHY THE REAL QUESTION IS NOT ‘WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY?’ BUT ‘HOW DID WE GET STUCK?’

为什么真正的问题不是 “社会不平等的起源是什么？” 而是 “我们是如何陷进去的？”

If we are right, and if human beings really have spent most of the last 40,000 or so years moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies then dismantling them again, the implications are profound. For one thing, it suggests that Pierre Clastres was quite right when he proposed that, rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so.

如果我们是对的，如果人类真的在过去 4 万年左右的时间里，在不同的社会组织形式之间来回穿梭，建立起等级制度，然后再将其拆除，其影响是深远的。首先，它表明，当皮埃尔·克拉斯特尔提出，在无国籍社会中，人们的政治自觉非但不比现在的人少，反而可能大大增强。

Clastres was another product of the 1960s. A student of Lévi-Strauss, he took to heart his master’s view of Amazonian chiefs as mature political actors. But Clastres was also an anarchist (he was ultimately kicked out of Lévi-Strauss’s research group on a flimsy pretext, involving unauthorized use of official stationery), and he took the argument much further. It wasn’t just that Amazonian chiefs were calculating politicians. They were calculating politicians forced to manoeuvre in a social environment apparently designed to ensure they could never exercise real political power. In the winter, the groups they led were tiny and inconsequential. In the summer, they didn’t ‘lead’ at all. Yes, their houses might have resembled social service dispensaries in modern welfare states; but as a result, in terms of material wealth, they were actually the poorest men in the village, since chiefs were expected constantly to give everything away. They were also expected to set an example by working much harder than everybody else. Even where they did have special privileges, like the Tupi or Nambikwara chiefs, who were the only men in their villages allowed to have multiple wives, the privilege was distinctly double-edged. The wives were held to be necessary to prepare feasts for the village. If any of those wives looked to other lovers, which it appears they ordinarily did, there was nothing much the chief could do about it, since he had to keep himself in everyone’s good graces to remain chief.

克拉斯特尔是 60 年代的另一个产物。作为列维·斯特劳斯的学生，他把他的老师关于亚马逊酋长是成熟的政治行为者的观点铭记于心。但克拉斯特尔也是一个无政府主义者（他最终被踢出了列维·斯特劳斯的研究小组，理由很不充分，涉及未经授权使用官方文具），而且他的论点要更进一步。这不仅仅是说亚马逊酋长是精打细算的政治家。他们是精打细算的政客，被迫在一个显然是为了确保他们永远无法行使真正的政治权力而设计的社会环境中进行周旋。在冬天，他们所领导的群体是微小的，无足轻重的。在夏天，他们根本就没有 “领导”。是的，他们的房子可能类似于现代福利国家的社会服务诊所；但结果是，就物质财富而言，他们实际上是村子里最穷的人，因为人们期望酋长不断地把所有东西送出去。他们还被期望通过比其他人更努力地工作来树立一个榜样。即使他们有特殊的特权，比如图皮族或南比克拉族的酋长，他们是村里唯一被允许有多个妻子的男人，但这种特权显然是双刃剑。妻子们被认为是为村庄准备宴席的必要条件。如果这些妻子中的任何一个找了其他情人，看来她们通常都是这样做的，酋长对此也无能为力，因为他必须保持自己在大家心目中的良好形象，才能继续担任酋长。

Chiefs found themselves in this situation, Clastres argued, because they weren’t the only ones who were mature and insightful political actors; almost everyone was. Rather than being trapped in some sort of Rousseauian innocence, unable to imagine more complex forms of organization, people were generally more capable than we are of imagining alternative social orders, and therefore had created ‘societies against the state’. They had self-consciously organized in such a way that the forms of arbitrary power and domination we associate with ‘advanced political systems’ could never possibly emerge.

克拉斯特尔认为，酋长们发现自己处于这种情况，因为，他们并不是唯一成熟和有洞察力的政治行为者；几乎所有人都是。人们不是被困在某种卢梭式的纯真中，无法想象更复杂的组织形式，而是通常比我们更有能力想象其他社会秩序，因此创造了 “反国家的社会”。他们自觉地组织起来，使我们与 “先进政治制度” 相关联的任意权力和统治的形式永远不可能出现。

Clastres’s argument was, as one might imagine, highly controversial. Some of the criticism directed at him was entirely justified (he had, for example, an enormous blind spot when it came to gender). Still, most of it was based on firm Rousseauian ground, insisting Clastres was ascribing too much imagination to ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ people who, almost by definition, shouldn’t have any. How could one possibly claim, so such criticism went, that stateless societies were self-consciously organizing themselves to prevent the emergence of something they’d never actually experienced?

正如人们可以想象的那样，克拉斯特尔的论点是非常有争议的。针对他的一些批评是完全合理的（例如，他在性别问题上有一个巨大的盲点）。但是，大部分批评还是建立在卢梭的坚实基础上，坚持认为克拉斯特尔把太多的想象力赋予了 “原始” 或 “古老” 的人，而根据定义，他们不应该有任何想象力。这样的批评认为，没有国家的社会是自觉地组织起来，防止出现他们从未实际经历过的东西，这怎么可能呢？

There are a lot of possible ways in which to respond to this objection. Were Amazonians of centuries past, for instance, entirely unaware of the great Andean empires to their west? People used to get around. It’s unlikely they simply had no idea of developments in neighbouring parts of the continent. As we’ll see in Chapter Seven, there is also now a good deal of evidence for the existence of large polities in Amazonia itself, in much earlier times. Perhaps these were the children of rebels who fled or even overthrew such ancient kingdoms. But the most obvious objection is that, if the Amazonians in question were anything like the Nambikwara, they actually did experience relations of arbitrary command during their yearly ‘adventures’ as foraging bands. Yet, oddly, Clastres himself never pointed this out. In fact, he never really talks about seasonality at all.

对这一反对意见有很多可能的回应方式。例如，过去几个世纪的亚马逊人是否完全不知道他们西部的安第斯帝国？人们曾经四处奔波。他们不可能完全不知道该大陆邻近地区的发展。正如我们将在第七章看到的那样，现在也有大量证据表明，在更早的时代，亚马逊地区本身就存在大型政体。也许这些是逃离或甚至推翻这些古代王国的叛乱者的孩子。但最明显的反对意见是，如果有关的亚马逊人与南比克瓦拉人一样，他们在每年的 “冒险” 中确实经历过任意指挥的关系，作为觅食的队伍。然而，奇怪的是，克拉斯特尔本人从未指出这一点。事实上，他根本就没有真正谈论过季节性。

This is a curious omission. It’s also an important one because, by leaving it out, Clastres really put the final nail in the coffin of that earlier tradition running from Marcel Mauss through to Robert Lowie; a tradition which treated ‘primitive’ societies as inherently flexible, and typically characterized by multiple forms of organization. Now, both the neo-evolutionists who saw ‘primitive’ folk as Rousseauian naïfs and the radicals who insisted they were self-conscious egalitarians equally took it for granted they were stuck in a single, very simple mode of social existence.

这是一个奇怪的遗漏。这也是一个重要的问题，因为通过遗漏它，克拉斯特尔真正把最后的钉子钉在了从马塞尔·莫斯到罗伯特·洛维的那个早期传统的棺材上；这个传统把 “原始” 社会视为内在的灵活性，并以多种形式的组织为典型特征。现在，无论是将 “原始” 民俗视为卢梭式的天真者的新进化论者，还是坚持他们是自觉的平等主义者的激进派，都同样认为他们被困在一个单一的、非常简单的社会存在模式中是理所当然的。

In Clastres’s case it’s all the more surprising, because in his original statement on the powerlessness of Indian chiefs, published in 1962, he is quite candid in admitting he pinched almost his entire argument from Lowie. Fourteen years earlier, Lowie had argued that most indigenous American societies, from Montreal to Tierra del Fuego, were effectively anarchists.⁵⁰ His argument that the ‘typical Indian chief is not a lawgiver, executive, or judge, but a pacifier, a benefactor of the poor, and a prolix Polonius’ (that is, the actual functions of chiefly office are to (1) mediate quarrels, (2) provide for the needy, and (3) to entertain with beautiful speeches) is precisely echoed, point by point, in Clastres’s account. So is Lowie’s conclusion that, since the chiefly office is effectively designed so it can never be turned into a means of compulsion, the only way state-like authority could possibly have emerged was from religious visionaries of one sort or another.

在克拉斯特尔的案例中，这更令人惊讶，因为在他 1962 年发表的关于印第安酋长无能为力的原始声明中，他很坦率地承认，他的整个论点几乎都是从洛维那里偷来的。14 年前，洛维认为，从蒙特利尔到火地岛，大多数美洲原住民社会实际上是无政府主义者。⁵⁰他认为 “典型的印第安酋长不是法律的制定者、执行者或法官，而是一个安抚者、穷人的施舍者和一个冗长的波洛涅斯”（也就是说，酋长职位的实际功能是 1. 调解争吵，2. 为穷人提供食物，以及 3. 用美丽的演讲来娱乐），这一点在克拉斯特里的叙述中得到了确切的回应。洛伊的结论也是如此，既然酋长职位被有效地设计为永远不能变成一种强制手段，那么类似于国家的权威出现的唯一途径就是来自于这样或那样的宗教幻想家。

Recall, though, that Lowie’s original piece included one additional section, on the ‘evolutionary germs’ of top-down authority, which describes the seasonal ‘police’ and ‘soldiers’ of the Plains societies in detail. Clastres simply left it out. Why?

不过，回顾一下，洛维的原作包括一个额外的部分，关于自上而下权威的 “进化胚胎”，其中详细描述了平原社会的季节性 “警察” 和 “士兵”。克拉斯特尔只是把它排除在外。为什么？

The answer is probably a simple one: seasonality was confusing. In fact, it’s kind of a wild card. The societies of the Great Plains created structures of coercive authority that lasted throughout the entire season of hunting and the rituals that followed, dissolving when they dispersed into smaller groups. But those of central Brazil dispersed into foraging bands as a way of asserting a political authority that was ineffectual in village settings. Among the Inuit, fathers ruled in the summertime; but in winter gatherings patriarchal authority and even norms of sexual propriety were challenged, subverted or simply melted away. The Kwakiutl were hierarchical at both times of year, but nonetheless maintained different forms of hierarchy, giving effective police powers to performers in the Midwinter Ceremonial (the ‘bear dancers’ and ‘fool dancers’) that could be exercised only during the actual performance of the ritual. At other times, aristocrats commanded great wealth but couldn’t give their followers direct orders. Many Central African forager societies are egalitarian all year round, but appear to alternate monthly between a ritual order dominated by men and another dominated by women.⁵¹

答案可能很简单：季节性令人困惑。事实上，它是一种通病。大平原的社会建立了强制性的权威结构，这种结构持续了整个狩猎季节和随后的仪式，当他们分散到较小的群体中时就会解散。但巴西中部的人则分散成觅食队，以此来维护在村庄环境中无效的政治权威。在因纽特人中，父亲在夏季统治；但在冬季的聚会中，父权甚至性行为规范都受到挑战，被颠覆或干脆融化了。Kwakiutl 人在一年中的这两个时间段都有等级制度，但仍然保持着不同形式的等级制度，将有效的警察权力赋予中冬仪式的表演者（“熊舞者” 和 “傻瓜舞者”），这些权力只能在实际表演仪式时行使。在其他时候，贵族们指挥着巨大的财富，但不能直接向他们的追随者下达命令。许多中非觅食者社会全年都是平等的，但似乎每月都会在由男性主导的仪式秩序和由女性主导的仪式秩序之间交替进行。⁵¹

In other words, there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for ‘the origins of social inequality’ really is asking the wrong question.

换句话说，不存在单一的模式。唯一一致的现象是改变的事实本身，以及随之而来的对不同社会可能性的认识。所有这些都证实了，寻找 “社会不平等的起源” 确实是在问一个错误的问题。

If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?

如果人类在我们的大部分历史中，一直在不同的社会安排之间来回流动，定期组装和拆除等级制度，也许真正的问题应该是 “我们是如何陷进去的？” 我们是如何在一个单一的模式中结束的？我们是如何失去曾经是我们这个物种的典型的政治自我意识的？我们怎么会把显赫和屈从不是作为暂时的权宜之计，甚至不是作为某种盛大的季节性戏剧的盛况，而是作为人类条件中不可避免的元素？如果我们一开始只是在玩游戏，那么在什么时候我们忘记了我们在玩游戏？

We’ll be tackling such questions in the chapters to come. For the moment, the main thing to stress is that this flexibility, and potential for political self-consciousness, was never entirely lost. Mauss pointed out much the same thing. Seasonality is still with us – even if it is a pale, contracted shadow of its former self. In the Christian world, for instance, there is still the midwinter ‘holiday season’ in which values and forms of organization do, to a limited degree, reverse themselves: the same media and advertisers who for most of the year peddle rabid consumerist individualism suddenly start announcing that social relations are what’s really important, and that to give is better than to receive. (And in enlightened countries like Mauss’s France, there’s also the summer grandes vacances in which everybody downs tools for a month and flees the cities.)

我们将在接下来的章节中处理这些问题。目前，主要要强调的是，这种灵活性和政治自我意识的潜力从未完全丧失。毛斯也指出了同样的问题。季节性仍然与我们同在 —— 即使它是其以前的苍白、收缩的阴影。例如，在基督教世界里，仍然有冬季中的 “节日”，在这个季节里，价值观和组织形式确实在有限的程度上发生了逆转：同样的媒体和广告商在一年的大部分时间里都在兜售狂热的消费主义个人主义，突然开始宣布，社会关系才是真正重要的，给予比接受更好。（在像莫斯的法国这样开明的国家，也有夏季的大假期，每个人都放下工具，逃离城市一个月。）

There is a direct historical connection here. We’ve already seen how, among societies like the Inuit or Kwakiutl, times of seasonal congregation were also ritual seasons, almost entirely given over to dances, rites and dramas. Sometimes these could involve creating temporary kings or even ritual police with real coercive powers (though often, peculiarly, these ritual police doubled as clowns).⁵² In other cases, they involved dissolving norms of hierarchy and propriety, as in the Inuit midwinter orgies. This dichotomy can still be observed in festive life almost everywhere. In the European Middle Ages, to take a familiar example, saints’ days alternated between solemn pageants where all the elaborate ranks and hierarchies of feudal life were made manifest (much as they still are in, say, a college graduation ceremony, when we temporarily revert to medieval garb), and crazy carnivals in which everyone played at ‘turning the world upside down’. In carnival, women might rule over men, children be put in charge of government, servants could demand work from their masters, ancestors could return from the dead, ‘carnival kings’ could be crowned and then dethroned, giant monuments like wicker dragons built and set on fire, or all formal ranks might even disintegrate into one or other form of Bacchanalian chaos.⁵³

这里有一个直接的历史联系。我们已经看到，在因纽特人或 Kwakiutl 等社会中，季节性聚会的时间也是仪式的季节，几乎完全交给了舞蹈、仪式和戏剧。有时，这些活动可能涉及建立临时国王，甚至是具有真正强制力的仪式警察（不过，奇怪的是，这些仪式警察往往兼任小丑）。⁵²在其他情况下，他们涉及解散等级和礼节的规范，如因纽特人的冬季狂欢。这种二分法在几乎所有的节日生活中都可以看到。在欧洲中世纪，举一个大家都熟悉的例子，圣人节在庄严的庆典和疯狂的狂欢之间交替进行，在庆典中，封建生活中所有精心设计的等级和层次都得到了体现（就像在大学毕业典礼上，当我们暂时恢复到中世纪的服装时，它们依然如此），在狂欢中，每个人都在玩 “颠覆世界” 的游戏。在狂欢节中，女人可以统治男人，孩子可以掌管政府，仆人可以向主人要求工作，祖先可以死而复生，“狂欢节国王” 可以加冕，然后被废黜，建造像柳条龙一样的巨大纪念碑并放火，或者所有正式的等级甚至可能瓦解成一种或其他形式的狂欢混乱。⁵³

Just as with seasonality, there’s no consistent pattern. Ritual occasions can either be much more stiff and formal, or much more wild and playful, than ordinary life. Alternatively, like funerals and wakes, they can slip back and forth between the two. The same seems to be true of festive life almost everywhere, whether it’s Peru, Benin or China. This is why anthropologists often have such trouble defining what a ‘ritual’ even is. If you start from the solemn ones, ritual is a matter of etiquette, propriety: High Church ritual, for example, is really just a very elaborate version of table manners. Some have gone so far as to argue that what we call ‘social structure’ only really exists during rituals: think here of families that only exist as a physical group during marriages and funerals, during which times questions of rank and priority have to be worked out by who sits at which table, who speaks first, who gets the topmost cut of the hump of a sacrificed water buffalo, or the first slice of wedding cake.

就像季节性一样，没有一致的模式。仪式场合可以比普通生活更加僵硬和正式，也可以更加狂野和俏皮。或者，像葬礼和守灵一样，它们可以在这两者之间来回滑动。无论是秘鲁、贝宁还是中国，几乎所有地方的节日生活都是这样的。这就是为什么人类学家在定义什么是 “仪式” 时经常遇到麻烦。如果你从庄严的开始，仪式是一个礼仪、礼节的问题：例如，高级教堂的仪式，实际上只是一个非常精致的餐桌礼仪的版本。有些人甚至认为，我们所谓的 “社会结构” 只有在仪式期间才真正存在：想想那些只在结婚和葬礼期间作为一个物理群体存在的家庭，在这些时候，等级和优先权问题必须通过谁坐在哪张桌子上、谁先说话、谁能得到牺牲的水牛的驼峰的最顶端，或第一片婚礼蛋糕来解决。

But sometimes festivals are moments where entirely different social structures take over, such as the ‘youth abbeys’ that seem to have existed across medieval Europe, with their Boy Bishops, May Queens, Lords of Misrule, Abbots of Unreason and Princes of Sots, who during the Christmas, Mayday or carnival season temporarily took over many of the functions of government and enacted a bawdy parody of government’s everyday forms. So there’s another school of thought which says that rituals are really exactly the opposite. The really powerful ritual moments are those of collective chaos, effervescence, liminality or creative play, out of which new social forms can come into the world.⁵⁴

但有时节日是完全不同的社会结构接管的时刻，例如似乎存在于整个中世纪欧洲的 “青年修道院”，他们有男孩主教、五月女王、不守规矩的领主、不讲道理的修道院院长和笨蛋王子，他们在圣诞节、五月天或狂欢节期间暂时接管了政府的许多职能，颁布了对政府日常形式的粗俗模仿。因此，还有一个学派说，仪式实际上正好相反。真正强大的仪式时刻是那些集体混乱、涌动、 边缘性或创造性游戏的时刻，从这些时刻中，新的社会形式可以进入世界。⁵⁴

There is also a centuries-long, and frankly not very enlightening, debate over whether the most apparently subversive popular festivals were really as subversive as they seem; or if they are really conservative, allowing common folk a chance to blow off a little steam and give vent to their baser instincts before returning to everyday habits of obedience.⁵⁵ It strikes us that all this rather misses the point.

还有一个长达几个世纪的争论，坦率地说，这个争论是关于最明显的颠覆性的大众节日是否真的像它们看起来那样颠覆；或者它们是否真的是保守的，让普通人有机会吹掉一点蒸汽，发泄他们更基本的本能，然后再回到日常的服从习惯中。⁵⁵我们觉得，这一切反而忽略了重点。

What’s really important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasize about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality. In the popular Babylonian story of Semiramis, the eponymous servant girl convinces the Assyrian king to let her be ‘Queen for a Day’ during some annual festival, promptly has him arrested, declares herself empress and leads her new armies to conquer the world. May Day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers’ holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival. Villagers who played at ‘turning the world upside’ would periodically decide they actually preferred the world upside down, and took measures to keep it that way.

这种节日真正重要的是，它们保持了政治自我意识的古老火花。它们允许人们想象其他安排是可行的，甚至对整个社会来说也是如此，因为人们总是有可能幻想狂欢节爆裂并成为新的现实。在流行的巴比伦故事《塞米拉米斯》中，同名的女仆说服亚述国王在某个年度节日里让她做 “一天的女王”，并迅速将他逮捕，宣布自己为皇后，带领她的新军队征服世界。五一节被选为国际工人节日的日期，主要是因为历史上有许多英国农民起义是在这个暴乱的节日开始的。玩 “颠覆世界” 游戏的村民会定期决定他们实际上更喜欢颠覆世界，并采取措施保持这种状态。

Medieval peasants often found it much easier than medieval intellectuals to imagine a society of equals. Now, perhaps, we begin to understand why. Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation – but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility. The first kings may well have been play kings. Then they became real kings. Now most (but not all) existing kings have been reduced once again to play kings – as least insofar as they mainly perform ceremonial functions and no longer wield real power. But even if all monarchies, including ceremonial monarchies, were to disappear, some people would still play at being kings.

中世纪的农民往往发现比中世纪的知识分子更容易想象一个平等的社会。现在，也许我们开始理解了原因。季节性节日可能是古老的季节变化模式的苍白回声 —— 但是，至少在人类历史的最后几千年里，它们在培养政治自我意识和作为社会可能性的实验室方面似乎发挥了大致相同的作用。最初的国王很可能是游戏中的国王。然后他们成为真正的国王。现在，大多数（但不是全部）现有的国王已经再次沦为游戏中的国王 —— 至少在他们主要履行仪式性职能而不再拥有真正的权力方面。但是，即使所有的君主制，包括礼仪性的君主制都消失了，有些人仍然会扮演国王的角色。

Even in the European Middle Ages, in places where monarchy was unquestioned as a mode of government, ‘Abbots of Unreason’, Yuletide Kings and the like tended to be chosen either by election or by sortition (lottery), the very forms of collective decision-making that resurfaced, apparently out of nowhere, in the Enlightenment. (What’s more, such figures tended to exercise power much in the manner of indigenous American chiefs: either limited to very circumscribed contexts, like the war chiefs who could give orders only during military expeditions; or like village chiefs who were arrayed with formal honours but couldn’t tell anybody what to do.) For a great many societies, the festive year could be read as a veritable encyclopaedia of possible political forms.

即使在欧洲中世纪，在君主制作为一种政府模式不受质疑的地方，“不讲理的修道院院长”、节日国王和类似人物往往是通过选举或抽签（彩票）选出的，这些集体决策形式在启蒙运动中显然是突然出现的。（更重要的是，这些人物往往以美洲本土酋长的方式行使权力：要么局限于非常有限的范围，如战争酋长，只能在军事远征期间发号施令；要么像村长，有正式的荣誉，但不能告诉任何人该做什么。）对于许多社会来说，节日年可以被解读为一部名副其实的可能政治形式的百科全书。

WHAT BEING SAPIENS REALLY MEANS

作为智人的真正含义

Let us end this chapter where we began it. For far too long we have been generating myths. As a result, we’ve been mostly asking the wrong questions: are festive rituals expressions of authority, or vehicles for social creativity? Are they reactionary or progressive? Were our earliest ancestors simple and egalitarian, or complex and stratified? Is human nature innocent or corrupt? Are we, as a species, inherently co-operative or competitive, kind or selfish, good or evil?

让我们在开始的地方结束这一章。长久以来，我们一直在制造神话。结果是，我们大多问错了问题：节日仪式是权威的表达，还是社会创造力的载体？它们是反动的还是进步的？我们最早的祖先是简单而平等的，还是复杂而分层的？人类的本性是无辜的还是堕落的？作为一个物种，我们本质上是合作还是竞争，是善良还是自私，是善还是恶？

Perhaps all these questions blind us to what really makes us human in the first place, which is our capacity – as moral and social beings – to negotiate between such alternatives. As we’ve already observed, it makes no sense to ask any such questions of a fish or a hedgehog. Animals already exist in a state ‘beyond good and evil’, the very one that Nietzsche dreamed humans might also aspire to. Perhaps we are doomed always to be arguing about such things. But certainly, it is more interesting to start asking other questions as well. If nothing else, surely the time has come to stop the swinging pendulum that has fixated generations of philosophers, historians and social scientists, leading their gaze from Hobbes to Rousseau, from Rousseau to Hobbes and back again. We do not have to choose any more between an egalitarian or hierarchical start to the human story. Let us bid farewell to the ‘childhood of Man’ and acknowledge (as Lévi-Strauss insisted) that our early ancestors were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them – at least the most reflexive among them – just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others. They were neither ignorant savages nor wise sons and daughters of nature. They were, as Helena Valero said of the Yanomami, just people, like us; equally perceptive, equally confused.

也许所有这些问题都让我们忽略了真正使我们成为人类的原因，那就是我们作为道德人和社会人的能力 —— 在这些选择之间进行谈判。正如我们已经观察到的，对一条鱼或一只刺猬提出任何这样的问题都是没有意义的。动物已经存在于一种 “超越善恶” 的状态中，这正是尼采所梦想的人类可能向往的状态。也许我们注定要一直为这些事情争论不休。但当然，开始问其他问题也是更有趣的。如果不出意外的话，现在肯定是时候停止摆动的钟摆了，这种钟摆让几代的哲学家、历史学家和社会科学家都固定下来，把他们的目光从霍布斯引向卢梭，从卢梭引向霍布斯，然后再引向卢梭。我们不必再在人类故事的平等主义或等级制度的起点之间做出选择。让我们告别 “人类的童年”，承认（正如列维·斯特劳斯所坚持的）我们的早期祖先不仅是我们认知上的平等者，也是我们智力上的同行。很可能的是，他们和我们一样在努力解决社会秩序和创造力的悖论；而且对它们的理解 —— 至少是他们中最有反思精神的人 —— 也一样多，这，也意味着一样少。他们也许对某些事情的认识更多，对另一些事情的认识更少。他们既不是无知的野蛮人，也不是大自然的聪明儿女。正如海伦娜·瓦莱罗在谈到亚诺玛米人时说的那样，他们只是人，和我们一样；同样有感知力，同样困惑。

Be this as it may, it’s becoming increasing clear that the earliest known evidence of human social life resembles a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. If there is a riddle here it’s this: why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens – supposedly the wisest of apes – allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root? Was this really a consequence of adopting agriculture? Of settling down in permanent villages and, later, towns? Should we be looking for a moment in time like the one Rousseau envisaged, when somebody first enclosed a tract of land, declaring: ‘This is mine and always will be!’ Or is that another fool’s errand?

尽管如此，越来越清楚的是，人类社会生活最早的证据类似于政治形式的狂欢节游行，远比进化论的单调抽象要好。如果这里有一个谜题的话，那就是：为什么在构建和拆解了几千年的等级制度之后，智人 —— 据说是最聪明的猿人 —— 允许永久性的、难以解决的不平等制度扎根？这真的是采用农业的结果吗？在永久的村庄和后来的城镇中定居下来？我们是否应该寻找一个像卢梭所设想的那样的时刻，当有人第一次圈出一片土地，宣布：“这是我的，永远都是！”。还是说这又是一个愚蠢的任务？

These are the questions to which we now turn.

IN WHICH WE DESCRIBE HOW THE OVERALL COURSE OF HUMAN HISTORY HAS MEANT THAT MOST PEOPLE LIVE THEIR LIVES ON AN EVER-SMALLER SCALE AS POPULATIONS GET LARGER

其中，我们描述了人类历史的总体进程是如何意味着随着人口的增加，大多数人的生活规模越来越小的。

In order for these things to become possible, a number of other factors first had to fall into place. One is the very existence of what we would intuitively recognize as discrete ‘societies’ to begin with. It may not even make sense to describe the mammoth hunters of Upper Palaeolithic Europe as being organized into separate, bounded societies, in the way we talk about the nations of Europe, or for that matter First Nations of Canada like the Mohawk, Wendat or Montagnais-Naskapi.

为了使这些事情成为可能，一些其他因素首先必须到位。一个是我们直觉地认识到的离散的 “社会” 的存在。把欧洲旧石器时代上部的猛犸象猎人描述成独立的、有界限的社会，就像我们谈论欧洲的国家，或加拿大的第一民族，如莫霍克族、温达族或蒙塔格奈斯·纳斯卡皮族那样，可能都没有意义。

Of course, we know almost nothing about the languages people were speaking in the Upper Palaeolithic, their myths, initiation rituals, or conceptions of the soul; but we do know that, from the Swiss Alps to Outer Mongolia, they were often using remarkably similar tools,¹ playing remarkably similar musical instruments, carving similar female figurines, wearing similar ornaments and conducting similar funeral rites. What’s more, there is reason to believe that at certain points in their lives, individual men and women often travelled very long distances.² Surprisingly, current studies of hunter-gatherers suggest that this is almost exactly what one should expect.

当然，我们对上旧石器时代人们的语言、他们的神话、入会仪式或灵魂概念几乎一无所知；但我们知道，从瑞士阿尔卑斯山到外蒙古，他们经常使用极为相似的工具。¹但我们知道，从瑞士阿尔卑斯山到外蒙古，他们经常使用非常相似的工具，演奏非常相似的乐器，雕刻相似的女性雕像，佩戴相似的装饰品，举行相似的丧葬礼节。更重要的是，我们有理由相信，在他们生活的某些阶段，个别的男人和女人经常走很远的路。²令人惊讶的是，目前对狩猎采集者的研究表明，这几乎正是人们应该期待的。

Research among groups such as the East African Hadza or Australian Martu shows that while forager societies today may be numerically small, their composition is remarkably cosmopolitan. When forager bands gather into larger residential groups these are not, in any sense, made up of a tight-knit unit of closely related kin; in fact, primarily biological relations constitute on average a mere 10 per cent of total membership. Most members are drawn from a much wider pool of individuals, many from quite far away, who may not even speak the same first languages.³ This is true even for contemporary groups that are effectively encapsulated in restricted territories, surrounded by farmers and pastoralists.

对东非哈德萨人或澳大利亚马尔图人等群体的研究表明，虽然今天的觅食者社会在数量上可能很小，但他们的构成却非常具有世界性。当觅食者聚集成较大的居住群体时，这些群体在任何意义上都不是由密切相关的亲属组成的紧密单位；事实上，主要的生物关系平均只占成员总数的 10%。大多数成员来自更广泛的人群，许多人来自很远的地方，他们甚至可能不说同样的第一语言。³即使是那些被农民和牧民包围在有限领土内的当代群体也是如此。

In earlier centuries, forms of regional organization might extend thousands of miles. Aboriginal Australians, for instance, could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners. Similarly, a North American 500 years ago could travel from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Louisiana bayous and still find settlements – speaking languages entirely unrelated to their own – with members of their own Bear, Elk or Beaver clans who were obliged to host and feed them.⁴

在早期的几个世纪里，区域组织的形式可能延伸到数千英里。例如，澳大利亚原住民可以穿越半个大陆，在讲完全不同语言的人中间移动，并且仍然发现营地被分为与国内相同的图腾部落。这意味着一半的居民欠他们的款待，但必须作为 “兄弟” 和 “姐妹” 对待（因此严禁发生性关系）；而另一半居民既是潜在的敌人，也是婚姻伙伴。同样，500 年前的北美人可以从大湖岸边走到路易斯安那州的河口，仍然可以找到定居点 —— 说的是与他们自己的语言完全无关的语言 —— 有他们自己的熊族、麋鹿族或海狸族的成员，他们有义务接待和喂养他们。⁴

It’s difficult enough to reconstruct how these forms of long-distance organization operated just a few centuries ago, before they were destroyed by the coming of European settlers. So we can really only guess how analogous systems might have worked some 40,000 years ago. But the striking material uniformities observed by archaeologists across very long distances attest to the existence of such systems. ‘Society’, insofar as we can comprehend it at that time, spanned continents.

要重建这些远距离组织形式在几个世纪前是如何运作的，在它们被欧洲定居者的到来破坏之前，这已经很困难了。所以我们真的只能猜测类似的系统在大约 4 万年前是如何运作的。但是，考古学家在很远的地方观察到的惊人的物质统一性证明了这种系统的存在。就我们当时所能理解的 “社会” 而言，它跨越了各大洲。

Much of this seems counter-intuitive. We are used to assuming that advances in technology are continually making the world a smaller place. In a purely physical sense, of course, this is true: the domestication of the horse, and gradual improvements in seafaring, to take just two examples, certainly made it much easier for people to move around. But at the same time, increases in the sheer number of human beings seem to have pulled in the opposite direction, ensuring that, for much of human history, ever-diminishing proportions of people actually travelled – at least, over long distances or very far from home. If we survey what happens over time, the scale on which social relations operate doesn’t get bigger and bigger; it actually gets smaller and smaller.

这其中的大部分似乎是违反直觉的。我们习惯于假设技术的进步正在不断地使世界变得更小。当然，从纯粹的物理意义上来说，这是真的：马的驯化和航海技术的逐步改进，仅举两个例子，肯定使人们的移动变得更加容易。但与此同时，人类数量的增加似乎起到了相反的作用，确保了在人类历史的大部分时间里，实际旅行的人的比例不断减少 —— 至少是在长距离或离家很远的地方。如果我们调查随着时间的推移所发生的事情，社会关系运作的规模并没有变得越来越大；它实际上变得越来越小。

A cosmopolitan Upper Palaeolithic is followed by a complicated period of several thousand years, beginning around 12,000 BC, in which it first becomes possible to trace the outlines of separate ‘cultures’ based on more than just stone tools. Some foragers, after this time, continued following large mammal herds; others settled on the coast and became fisherfolk, or gathered acorns in forests. Prehistorians use the term ‘Mesolithic’ for these postglacial populations. Across large parts of Africa and East Asia, their technological innovations – including pottery, ‘micro-lithic’ tool kits and stone grinding tools – signal new ways of preparing and eating wild grains, roots and other vegetables: chopping, slicing, grating, grinding, soaking, draining, boiling, and also ways of storing, smoking and otherwise preserving meats, plant foods and fish.⁵

在世界性的上旧石器时代之后，是一个复杂的时期，大约从公元前 12000 年开始，在这个时期，人们第一次有可能追踪到独立的 “文化” 的轮廓，而不仅仅是基于石头工具。在这一时期之后，一些觅食者继续追随大型哺乳动物群；另一些则定居在海岸，成为渔民，或在森林中采集橡子。史前学家用 “中石器时代” 一词来形容这些冰期后的人群。在非洲和东亚的大部分地区，他们的技术创新 —— 包括陶器、“微型石器” 工具包和石磨工具 —— 标志着准备和食用野生谷物、根茎和其他蔬菜的新方法：切碎、切片、磨碎、浸泡、沥干、煮沸，以及储存、熏制和以其他方式保存肉类、植物食品和鱼类的方法。⁵

Before long these had spread everywhere, and paved the way for the creation of what we’d now call cuisine: the kind of soups, porridges, stews, broths and fermented beverages we’re familiar with today. But cuisines are also, almost everywhere, markers of difference. People who wake up to fish stews every morning tend to see themselves as a different sort of people from those who breakfast on a porridge of berries and wild oats. Such distinctions were no doubt echoed by parallel developments that are much more difficult to reconstruct: different tastes in clothing, dancing, drugs, hairstyles, courtship rituals; different forms of kinship organization and styles of formal rhetoric. The ‘culture areas’ of these Mesolithic foragers were still extremely large. True, the Neolithic versions that soon developed alongside them – associated with the first farming populations – were typically smaller; but for the most part they still spread out over territories considerably larger than most modern nation states.

不久之后，这些东西就传遍了各地，并为我们现在所说的美食的产生铺平了道路：我们今天所熟悉的那种汤、粥、 炖菜、肉汤和发酵饮料。但是，几乎在任何地方，美食也是差异的标志。每天早上在炖鱼中醒来的人，往往认为自己是与那些以浆果和野燕麦粥为早餐的人不同的一类人。这种区别无疑是由更难重建的平行发展所呼应的：对服装、舞蹈、毒品、发型、求爱仪式的不同品味；不同形式的亲属组织和正式修辞的风格。这些中石器时代觅食者的 “文化区” 仍然非常大。诚然，很快与他们一起发展起来的新石器时代版本 —— 与第一批农业人口有关 —— 通常较小；但在大多数情况下，他们仍然分布在比大多数现代民族国家大得多的地区。

Only much later do we begin to encounter the kind of situation familiar to anthropologists of Amazonia or Papua New Guinea, where a single river valley might contain speakers of half a dozen different languages, with entirely distinct economic systems or cosmological beliefs. Sometimes, of course, this tendency towards micro-differentiation was reversed – as with the spread of imperial languages like English or Han Chinese. But the overall direction of history – at least until very recently – would seem to be the very opposite of globalization. It is one of increasingly local allegiances: extraordinary cultural inventiveness, but much of it aimed at finding new ways for people to set themselves off against each other. True, the larger regional networks of hospitality endured in some places.⁶ Overall, though, what we observe is not so much the world as a whole getting smaller, but most peoples’ social worlds growing more parochial, their lives and passions more likely to be circumscribed by boundaries of culture, class and language.

只有在很久以后，我们才开始遇到亚马逊或巴布亚新几内亚的人类学家所熟悉的那种情况，在那里，一个河谷可能包含有半打不同语言的使用者，有着完全不同的经济体系或宇宙论信仰。当然，有时这种微观差异的趋势会被逆转 —— 如英语或汉族等帝国语言的传播。但历史的总体方向 —— 至少直到最近 —— 似乎与全球化截然相反。这是一个越来越多的地方效忠：非凡的文化创造力，但其中大部分旨在为人们找到新的方法，使他们彼此分离。诚然，较大的区域性接待网络在一些地方仍然存在。⁶但总的来说，我们看到的不是整个世界变得越来越小，而是大多数人的社会世界变得越来越狭隘，他们的生活和激情更可能被文化、阶级和语言的界限所限制。

We might ask why all this has happened. What are the mechanisms that cause human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbours? This is an important question. We shall be considering it in much more detail in the following chapter.

我们可能会问为什么会发生这一切。是什么机制导致人类花费如此多的精力，试图证明他们与邻居的不同？这是一个重要的问题。我们将在下一章中更详细地考虑这个问题。

For the moment, we simply note that the proliferation of separate social and cultural universes – confined in space and relatively bounded – must have contributed in various ways to the emergence of more durable and intransigent forms of domination. The mixed composition of so many foraging societies clearly indicates that individuals were routinely on the move for a plethora of reasons, including taking the first available exit route if one’s personal freedoms were threatened at home. Cultural porosity is also necessary for the kind of seasonal demographic pulses that made it possible for societies to alternate periodically between different political arrangements, forming massive congregations at one time of year, then dispersing into a multitude of smaller units for the remainder.

目前，我们只是注意到，独立的社会和文化世界的扩散 —— 在空间上的限制和相对的约束 —— 肯定以各种方式促进了更持久和顽固的统治形式的出现。如此多的觅食社会的混合组成清楚地表明，个人经常因各种原因而迁移，包括在家中个人自由受到威胁时采取第一条可用的出口路线。文化的多孔性对于那种季节性的人口脉动也是必要的，这使得社会有可能在不同的政治安排之间定期交替，在一年中的某个时候形成大规模的聚集，然后在其余时间分散成许多较小的单位。

That is one reason why the majestic theatre of Palaeolithic ‘princely’ burials – or even of Stonehenge – never seems to have gone too far beyond theatrics. Simply put, it’s difficult to exercise arbitrary power in, say, January over someone you will be facing on equal terms again come July. The hardening and multiplication of cultural boundaries can only have reduced such possibilities.

这就是为什么旧石器时代的 “王子” 墓葬 —— 甚至巨石阵 —— 的雄伟戏剧似乎从未超越戏剧性的原因之一。简单地说，在一月份对一个你将在七月份再次平等面对的人行使任意的权力是很难的。文化边界的硬化和增殖只能减少这种可能性。

IN WHICH WE ASK WHAT, PRECISELY, IS EQUALIZED IN ‘EGALITARIAN’ SOCIETIES?

其中我们要问的是，在 “平等主义” 的社会中，到底什么是平等的？

The emergence of local cultural worlds during the Mesolithic made it more likely that a relatively self-contained society might abandon seasonal dispersal and settle into some kind of full-time, top-down, hierarchical arrangement. In our terms, to get stuck. But of course, this in itself hardly explains why any particular society did, in fact, get stuck in such arrangements. We are back to something not entirely different from the ‘origins of social inequality’ problem – but by now, we can at least focus a little more sharply on what the problem really is.

在中石器时代，地方文化世界的出现使得一个相对独立的社会更有可能放弃季节性的分散，而沉淀为某种全职的、自上而下的等级制度安排。用我们的话说，就是卡住了。但当然，这本身很难解释为什么任何特定的社会事实上会陷入这种安排中。我们又回到了与 “社会不平等的起源” 问题并不完全不同的地方 —— 但到现在，我们至少可以更尖锐地关注这个问题到底是什么。

As we have repeatedly observed, ‘inequality’ is a slippery term, so slippery, in fact, that it’s not entirely clear what the term ‘egalitarian society’ should even mean. Usually, it’s defined negatively: as the absence of hierarchies (the belief that certain people or types of people are superior to others), or as the absence of relations of domination or exploitation. This is already quite complex, and the moment we try to define egalitarianism in positive terms everything becomes much more so.

正如我们反复观察到的，“不平等” 是一个滑稽的术语，事实上，滑稽到甚至不完全清楚 “平等主义社会” 这个术语应该意味着什么。通常，它被消极地定义为：没有等级制度（认为某些人或某些类型的人比其他人优越），或者没有统治或剥削关系。这已经很复杂了，而当我们试图从正面定义平等主义的时候，一切都变得更加复杂了。

On the one hand, ‘egalitarianism’ (as opposed to ‘equality’, let alone ‘uniformity’ or ‘homogeneity’) seems to refer to the presence of some kind of ideal. It’s not just that an outside observer would tend to see all members of, say, a Semang hunting party as pretty much interchangeable, like the cannon-fodder minions of some alien overlord in a science fiction movie (this would, in fact, be rather offensive); but rather, that Semang themselves feel they ought to be the same – not in every way, since that would be ridiculous, but in the ways that really matter. It also implies that this ideal is, largely, realized. So, as a first approximation, we can speak of an egalitarian society if (1) most people in a given society feel they really ought to be the same in some specific way, or ways, that are agreed to be particularly important; and (2) that ideal can be said to be largely achieved in practice.

一方面，“平均主义”（相对于 “平等”，更不用说 “统一性” 或 “同质性”）似乎是指存在着某种理想。这不仅仅是指外部观察者倾向于将所有成员，例如塞芒人的狩猎队，看作是几乎可以互换的，就像科幻电影中某个外星霸主的炮灰奴才一样（事实上，这相当令人反感）；而是指塞芒人自己觉得他们应该是一样的 —— 不是在所有方面，因为那会很可笑，而是在真正重要的方面。这也意味着，这一理想在很大程度上得到了实现。因此，作为一个初步的近似，我们可以说是一个平等主义的社会，如果（1）在一个特定的社会中，大多数人觉得他们真的应该在某些特定的方式或方式上是相同的，被认为是特别重要的；和（2）这个理想可以说是在实践中基本实现。

Another way to put this might be as follows. If all societies are organized around certain key values (wealth, piety, beauty, freedom, knowledge, warrior prowess), then ‘egalitarian societies’ are those where everyone (or almost everyone) agrees that the paramount values should be, and generally speaking are, distributed equally. If wealth is what’s considered the most important thing in life, then everyone is more or less equally wealthy. If learning is most valued, then everyone has equal access to knowledge. If what’s most important is one’s relationship with the gods, then a society is egalitarian if there are no priests and everyone has equal access to places of worship.

另一种说法可能是这样的。如果所有的社会都是围绕着某些关键价值（财富、虔诚、美、自由、知识、战力）组织起来的，那么 “平等主义社会” 就是那些每个人（或几乎每个人）都同意最重要的价值应该，而且一般来说是平等分配。如果财富被认为是生活中最重要的东西，那么每个人的财富或多或少都是平等的。如果学习是最有价值的，那么每个人都有平等的机会获得知识。如果最重要的是一个人与神的关系，那么如果没有祭司，每个人都有平等的机会进入礼拜场所，那么这个社会就是平等主义的。

You may have noticed an obvious problem here. Different societies sometimes have radically different systems of value, and what might be most important in one – or at least, what everyone insists is most important in one – might have very little to do with what’s important in another. Imagine a society in which everyone is equal before the gods, but 50 per cent of the population are sharecroppers with no property and therefore no legal or political rights. Does it really make sense to call this an ‘egalitarian society’ – even if everyone, including the sharecroppers, insists that it’s really only one’s relation to the gods that is ultimately important?

你可能已经注意到这里有一个明显的问题。不同的社会有时有着截然不同的价值体系，在一个社会中最重要的东西 —— 或者至少是每个人都坚持认为在一个社会中最重要的东西 —— 可能与另一个社会中的重要东西关系不大。想象一下这样一个社会，在上帝面前人人平等，但 50% 的人口是佃农，没有财产，因此没有法律或政治权利。把这称为 “平等主义社会” 真的有意义吗 —— 即使每个人，包括佃农，都坚持认为只有一个人与神的关系才是最终重要的？

There’s only one way out of this dilemma: to create some sort of universal, objective standards by which to measure equality. Since the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, this has almost invariably meant focusing on property arrangements. As we’ve seen, it was only at this point, in the mid to late eighteenth century, that European philosophers first came up with the idea of ranking human societies according to their means of subsistence, and therefore that hunter-gatherers should be treated as a distinct variety of human being. As we’ve also seen, this idea is very much still with us. But so is Rousseau’s argument that it was only the invention of agriculture that introduced genuine inequality, since it allowed for the emergence of landed property. This is one of the main reasons people today continue to write as if foragers can be assumed to live in egalitarian bands to begin with – because it’s also assumed that without the productive assets (land, livestock) and stockpiled surpluses (grain, wool, dairy products, etc.) made possible by farming, there was no real material basis for anyone to lord it over anyone else.

摆脱这种困境的办法只有一个：建立某种普遍的、客观的标准，以此来衡量平等。自让·雅克·卢梭和亚当·斯密的时代起，这几乎无一例外地意味着关注财产安排。正如我们所看到的，只是在这一点上，在十八世纪中后期，欧洲哲学家首次提出了根据人类社会的生存手段进行排名的想法，因此，狩猎·采集者应该被视为人类的一个独特品种。正如我们所看到的，这种想法在很大程度上仍在我们身边。但卢梭的论点也是如此，即只有农业的发明才带来了真正的不平等，因为它允许土地财产的出现。这也是今天人们继续写作的主要原因之一，好像可以假设觅食者一开始就生活在平等主义的队伍中 —— 因为人们还假设，如果没有农业所带来的生产性资产（土地、牲畜）和储存的剩余物（谷物、羊毛、乳制品等），就没有真正的物质基础让任何人支配其他人。

Conventional wisdom also tells us that the moment a material surplus does become possible, there will also be full-time craft specialists, warriors and priests laying claim to it, and living off some portions of that surplus (or, in the case of warriors, spending the bulk of their time trying to figure out new ways to steal it from each other); and before long, merchants, lawyers and politicians will inevitably follow. These new elites will, as Rousseau emphasized, band together to protect their assets, so the advent of private property will be followed, inexorably, by the rise of ‘the state’.

传统的智慧还告诉我们，当物质盈余确实成为可能的时候，也会有全职的手工艺专家、战士和牧师对其提出要求，并靠这部分盈余过活（或者，在战士的情况下，他们的大部分时间都在试图找出新的方法从对方那里偷走盈余）；不久，商人、律师和政治家将不可避免地跟进。正如卢梭所强调的那样，这些新的精英将联合起来保护他们的资产，因此私有财产的出现将不可避免地伴随着 “国家” 的崛起。

We will scrutinize this conventional wisdom in more detail later. For now, suffice to say that while there is a broad truth here, it is so broad as to have very little explanatory power. For sure, only cereal-farming and grain storage made possible bureaucratic regimes like those of Pharaonic Egypt, the Maurya Empire or Han China. But to say that cereal-farming was responsible for the rise of such states is a little like saying that the development of calculus in medieval Persia is responsible for the invention of the atom bomb. It is true that without calculus atomic weaponry would never have been possible. One might even make a case that the invention of calculus set off a chain of events that made it likely someone, somewhere, would eventually create nuclear weapons. But to assert that Al-Tusi’s work on polynomials in the 1100s caused Hiroshima and Nagasaki is clearly absurd. Similarly, with agriculture. Roughly 6,000 years stand between the appearance of the first farmers in the Middle East and the rise of what we are used to calling the first states; and in many parts of the world, farming never led to the emergence of anything remotely like those states.⁷

我们将在后面更详细地审视这一传统智慧。现在，我们只需说，虽然这里有一个广泛的真理，但它是如此广泛，以至于没有什么解释力。可以肯定的是，只有谷物种植和谷物储存才有可能形成法老埃及、毛利雅帝国或汉族中国这样的官僚制度。但是说谷物种植是这些国家崛起的原因，有点像说中世纪波斯的微积分发展是原子弹发明的原因。诚然，如果没有微积分，原子武器是不可能出现的。人们甚至可以说，微积分的发明引发了一连串的事件，使某个地方的某个人最终有可能制造出核武器。但断言阿尔·图西在 1100 年代对多项式的研究导致了广岛和长崎的发生，显然是荒谬的。同样，在农业方面也是如此。 从中东出现第一批农民到我们习惯称之为第一批国家的崛起，大约有 6000 年的时间；而在世界许多地方，农业从未导致任何类似于这些国家的出现。⁷

At this juncture, we need to focus on the very notion of a surplus, and the much broader – almost existential – questions it raises. As philosophers realized long ago, this is a concept that poses fundamental questions about what it means to be human. One of the things that sets us apart from non-human animals is that animals produce only and exactly what they need; humans invariably produce more. We are creatures of excess, and this is what makes us simultaneously the most creative, and most destructive, of all species. Ruling classes are simply those who have organized society in such a way that they can extract the lion’s share of that surplus for themselves, whether through tribute, slavery, feudal dues or manipulating ostensibly free-market arrangements.

在这个时候，我们需要关注盈余的概念本身，以及它所提出的更广泛的 —— 几乎是存在性的 —— 问题。正如哲学家们很早就意识到的那样，这个概念提出了关于作为人类意味着什么的根本问题。将我们与非人类动物区分开来的原因之一是，动物只生产它们所需要的东西；而人类总是会生产更多。我们是过剩的生物，这也是使我们同时成为所有物种中最具创造性和最具破坏性的物种的原因。统治阶级只是那些以这样一种方式组织社会的人，他们可以为自己提取大部分的盈余，无论是通过进贡、奴隶制、封建会费还是操纵表面上的自由市场安排。

In the nineteenth century, Marx and many of his fellow radicals did imagine that it was possible to administer such a surplus collectively, in an equitable fashion (this is what he envisioned as being the norm under ‘primitive communism’, and what he thought could once again be possible in the revolutionary future), but contemporary thinkers tend to be more sceptical. In fact, the dominant view among anthropologists nowadays is that the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all.

在 19 世纪，马克思和他的许多激进主义同伴确实想象过，有可能以公平的方式集体管理这种剩余（这是他设想的 “原始共产主义” 下的规范，也是他认为在革命的未来可能再次出现的情况），但当代思想家往往更加怀疑。事实上，现在人类学家的主流观点是，维持一个真正平等的社会的唯一方法是消除积累任何形式的剩余的可能性。

The greatest modern authority on hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is, by general consent, the British anthropologist James Woodburn. In the post-war decades Woodburn conducted research among the Hadza, a forager society of Tanzania. He also drew parallels between them and the San Bushmen and Mbuti Pygmies, as well as a number of other small-scale nomadic forager societies outside Africa, such as the Pandaram of south India or Batek of Malaysia.⁸ Such societies are, Woodburn suggests, the only genuinely egalitarian societies we know of, since they are the only ones that extend equality to gender relations and, as much as is practicable, to relations between old and young.

在狩猎采集者的平等主义方面，现代最伟大的权威是英国人类学家詹姆斯·伍德伯恩，这是大家公认的。在战后的几十年里，伍德伯恩在坦桑尼亚的哈德扎人（Hadza）中进行了研究，这是一个觅食者社会。他还将他们与 San Bushmen 和 Mbuti Pygmies，以及非洲以外的其他一些小规模游牧觅食社会，如南印度的 Pandaram 或马来西亚的 Batek 进行了比较。⁸伍德伯恩认为，这些社会是我们所知道的唯一真正平等的社会，因为它们是唯一将平等延伸到性别关系，并尽可能延伸到老少关系的社会。

Focusing on such societies allowed Woodburn to sidestep the question of what is being equalized and what isn’t, because populations like the Hadza appear to apply principles of equality to just about everything it is possible to apply them to: not just material possessions, which are constantly being shared out or passed around, but herbal or sacred knowledge, prestige (talented hunters are systematically mocked and belittled), and so on. All such behaviour, Woodburn insisted, is based on a self-conscious ethos, that no one should ever be in a relation of ongoing dependency to anybody else. This echoes what we heard in the last chapter from Christopher Boehm about the ‘actuarial intelligence’ of egalitarian hunter-gatherers, but Woodburn adds a twist: the real defining feature of such societies is, precisely, the lack of any material surplus.

关注这样的社会让伍德伯恩避开了，即什么被平等化，什么没有被平等化的问题，因为像哈德萨人这样的人群似乎将平等的原则应用于几乎所有可能应用的东西：不仅仅是物质财富，这些东西不断被分享或传递，还有草药或神圣的知识、声望（有天赋的猎人被系统地嘲笑和贬低），等等。伍德本坚持认为，所有这些行为都是基于一种自觉的精神，即任何人都不应该持续依赖别人。这与我们在上一章听到的克里斯托弗·博姆关于平等主义的狩猎采集者的 “精算智慧” 相呼应，但伍德伯恩增加了一个转折：这种社会的真正决定性特征恰恰是缺乏任何物质剩余。

Truly egalitarian societies, for Woodburn, are those with ‘immediate return’ economies: food brought home is eaten the same day or the next; anything extra is shared out, but never preserved or stored. All this is in stark contrast to most foragers, and all pastoralists or farmers, who can be characterized as having ‘delayed return’ economies, regularly investing their energies in projects that only bear fruit at some point in the future. Such investments, he argues, inevitably lead to ongoing ties that can become the basis for some individuals to exercise power over others; what’s more, Woodburn assumes a certain ‘actuarial intelligence’ – Hadza and other egalitarian foragers understand all this perfectly well, and as a result they self-consciously avoid stockpiling resources or engaging in any long-term projects.

在伍德伯恩看来，真正的平等主义社会是那些具有 “即时回报” 经济的社会：带回家的食物在当天或第二天就被吃掉；多余的东西被分享出去，但从不保存或储存。所有这些都与大多数觅食者和所有牧民或农民形成鲜明对比，他们可以被描述为具有 “延迟回报” 经济，定期将他们的精力投入到只有在未来某个时候才会有结果的项目中。他认为，这种投资不可避免地会导致持续的联系，而这种联系会成为一些人对其他人行使权力的基础；更重要的是，伍德伯恩假设了某种 “精算智慧” —— 哈扎人和其他平等主义的觅食者完全了解这一切，因此他们自觉地避免储存资源或参与任何长期项目。

Far from rushing blindly for their chains like Rousseau’s savages, Woodburn’s ‘immediate return hunter-gatherers’ understand precisely where the chains of captivity loom, and organize much of their lives to keep away from them. This might sound like the basis of something hopeful or optimistic. Actually, it’s anything but. What it suggests is, again, that any equality worth the name is essentially impossible for all but the very simplest foragers. What kind of future might we then have in store? At best, we could perhaps imagine (with the invention of Star Trek replicators or other immediate-gratification devices) that it might be possible, at some point in the distant future, to create something like a society of equals once more. But in the meantime, we are definitively stuck. In other words, this is the Garden of Eden narrative all over again – just, this time, with the bar for paradise set even higher.

伍德本的 “立即返回的狩猎采集者” 并不像卢梭笔下的野蛮人那样盲目地冲向他们的枷锁，而是准确地了解被囚禁的枷锁在哪里，并组织他们的大部分生活以远离它们。这听起来可能是充满希望或乐观的东西的基础。事实上，它不是这样的。它所暗示的是，除了最简单的觅食者之外，任何有价值的平等基本上都是不可能的。那么我们可能会有什么样的未来呢？在最好的情况下，我们也许可以想象（随着《星际迷航》复制器或其他即时满足装置的发明），在遥远的未来的某个时刻，有可能再次创造一个类似平等的社会。但与此同时，我们肯定会被困住。换句话说，这又是一次伊甸园的叙事 —— 只是，这一次，天堂的标准设置得更高。

What’s really striking about Woodburn’s vision is that the foragers he focuses on appear to have reached such profoundly different conclusions from Kandiaronk, and several generations of First Nation critics before him, all of whom had trouble even imagining that differences of wealth could be translated into systematic inequalities of power. Recall that the American indigenous critique, as we described it in Chapter Two, was initially about something very different: the perceived failure of European societies to promote mutual aid and protect personal liberties. Only later, once indigenous intellectuals had more exposure to the workings of French and English society, did it come to focus on inequalities of property. Perhaps we should follow their initial train of thought.

伍德本的观点真正引人注目的是，他所关注的觅食者似乎与 Kandiaronk 以及在他之前的几代原住民批评家得出了如此深刻的结论，所有这些人甚至很难想象财富的差异可以转化为系统的权力不平等。回顾一下，我们在第二章中描述的美洲原住民批评，最初是关于一些非常不同的东西：认为欧洲社会未能促进互助和保护个人自由。只是后来，一旦本土知识分子更多地接触到法国和英国社会的运作，它才开始关注财产的不平等问题。也许我们应该遵循他们最初的思路。

Few anthropologists are particularly happy with the term ‘egalitarian societies’, for reasons that should now be obvious; but it lingers on because no one has suggested a compelling alternative. The closest we’re aware of is the feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock’s suggestion that most members of what are called egalitarian societies seem less interested in equality per se than what she calls ‘autonomy’. What matters to Montagnais-Naskapi women, for instance, is not so much whether men and women are seen to be of equal status but whether women are, individually or collectively, able to live their lives and make their own decisions without male interference.⁹

很少有人类学家对 “平等主义社会” 这个词感到特别满意，原因现在应该是显而易见的；但它仍然存在，因为没有人提出一个令人信服的替代方案。我们知道最接近的是女权主义人类学家埃莉诺·利考克的建议，即所谓的平等主义社会的大多数成员似乎对平等本身不感兴趣，而对她所说的 “自治” 感兴趣。例如，对 Montagnais-Naskapi 妇女来说，重要的不是男人和女人是否被视为地位平等，而是妇女是否能够在没有男性干预的情况下单独或集体地生活并做出自己的决定。⁹

In other words, if there is a value these women feel should be distributed equally, it is precisely what we would refer to as ‘freedom’. Perhaps the best thing, then, would be to call these ‘free societies’; or even, following the Jesuit Father Lallemant’s verdict on the Montagnais-Naskapi’s Wendat neighbours, ‘free people’, each of whom ‘considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.’¹⁰ At first glance, Wendat society, with its elaborate constitutional structure of chiefs, speakers and other office holders, might not seem an obvious choice for inclusion on a list of ‘egalitarian’ societies. But ‘chiefs’ are not really chiefs if they have no means to enforce orders. Equality, in societies such as those of the Wendat, was a direct consequence of individual liberty. Of course, the same can be said in reverse: liberties are not really liberties if one cannot act on them. Most people today also believe they live in free societies (indeed, they often insist that, politically at least, this is what is most important about their societies), but the freedoms which form the moral basis of a nation like the United States are, largely, formal freedoms.

换句话说，如果这些妇女认为有一种价值应该被平均分配，那正是我们所说的 “自由”。那么，也许最好的办法是将这些社会称为 “自由社会”；甚至，按照耶稣会神父 拉勒芒对 Montagnais-Naskapi 的温达特邻居的判断，称为 “自由人”，他们每个人都 “认为自己和其他人一样重要；他们只在自己高兴的情况下服从他们的酋长。¹⁰乍一看，温达特社会及其由酋长、发言人和其他官员组成的复杂的宪法结构，似乎不是列入” 平等主义 “社会名单的明显选择”。但是，如果 “酋长” 没有执行命令的手段，他们就不是真正的酋长。在温达特人这样的社会中，平等是个人自由的直接结果。当然，同样的道理也可以反过来说：如果一个人不能对其采取行动，那么自由就不是真正的自由。今天，大多数人也相信他们生活在自由的社会中（事实上，他们经常坚持认为，至少在政治上，这是他们的社会最重要的地方），但构成美洲这样的国家的道德基础的自由，主要是形式上的自由。

American citizens have the right to travel wherever they like – provided, of course, they have the money for transport and accommodation. They are free from ever having to obey the arbitrary orders of superiors – unless, of course, they have to get a job. In this sense, it is almost possible to say the Wendat had play chiefs¹¹ and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms. Or to put the matter more technically: what the Hadza, Wendat or ‘egalitarian’ people such as the Nuer seem to have been concerned with were not so much formal freedoms as substantive ones.¹² They were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers). Mutual aid – what contemporary European observers often referred to as ‘communism’ – was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy.

美洲公民有权去他们喜欢的地方旅行 —— 当然，前提是他们有足够的钱支付交通和住宿。他们永远不必服从上级的任意命令 —— 当然，除非他们必须找到一份工作。在这个意义上，几乎可以说温达特人可以玩耍酋长¹¹并拥有真正的自由，而我们今天的大多数人却不得不忍受真正的酋长，然后玩耍着自由。或者说得更专业一点：哈德萨人、温达特人或努尔人等 “平等主义” 的人所关心的，与其说是形式上的自由，不如说是实质上的自由。¹²他们对旅行的权利不感兴趣，而对实际旅行的可能性不感兴趣（因此，此事通常被描述为对陌生人提供招待的义务）。互助 —— 当代欧洲观察家经常称之为 “共产主义” —— 被认为是个人自主的必要条件。

This might help explain at least some of the apparent confusion around the term egalitarianism: it is possible for explicit hierarchies to emerge, but to nonetheless remain largely theatrical, or to confine themselves to very limited aspects of social life. Let us return for a moment to the Sudanese Nuer. Ever since the Oxford social anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard published his classic ethnography of them in the 1940s, the Nuer were held out as the very paradigm for ‘egalitarian’ societies in Africa. They had nothing even remotely resembling institutions of government and were notorious for the high value they placed on personal independence. But by the 1960s, feminist anthropologists like Kathleen Gough were showing that, again, you couldn’t really speak of equality of status here: males in Nuer communities were divided between ‘aristocrats’ (with ancestral connections to the territories where they live), ‘strangers’ and lowly war captives taken by force in raids on other communities. Neither were these purely formal distinctions. While Evans-Pritchard had written off such differences as inconsequential, in reality, as Gough noted, difference in rank implied differential access to women. Only the aristocrats could easily assemble enough cattle to arrange what Nuer considered a ‘proper’ marriage – that is, one in which they could claim paternity over the children and thus be remembered as ancestors after their death.¹³

这至少有助于解释围绕着平等主义一词的一些明显的混乱：明确的等级制度有可能出现，但在很大程度上仍然是戏剧性的，或者仅限于社会生活的非常有限的方面。让我们再来看看苏丹努埃尔人的情况。自从牛津大学社会人类学家 E·E·埃文斯·普里查德在 1940 年代发表了他的经典民族志以来，努尔人就被认为是非洲 “平等主义” 社会的典范。他们没有任何类似于政府机构的东西，并因高度重视个人独立而臭名昭著。但到了 20 世纪 60 年代，凯瑟琳·高夫（Kathleen Gough）等女权主义人类学家表明，在这里你无法真正谈论地位的平等：努埃尔人社区的男性被分为 “贵族”（与他们居住的领土有祖先的联系）、“陌生人” 和在袭击其他社区时被强行带走的卑贱的战争俘虏。这些都不是纯粹的形式上的区分。虽然埃文斯·普里查德把这种差别写成无足轻重，但实际上，正如高夫所指出的，等级的不同意味着接触妇女的机会也不同。只有贵族才能轻易地聚集足够的牲畜来安排努尔人认为 “适当的” 婚姻 —— 也就是说，在这种婚姻中，他们可以，声称自己是孩子的父亲，从而在死后作为祖先被记住。¹³

So was Evans-Pritchard simply wrong? Not exactly. In fact, while rank and differential access to cattle became relevant when people were arranging marriages, they had almost no bearing in any other circumstances. It would have been impossible, even at a formal event like a dance or sacrifice, to determine who was ‘above’ anyone else. Most importantly, differences in wealth (cattle) never translated into the ability to give orders, or to demand formal obeisance. In an often-cited passage Evans-Pritchard wrote:

那么，埃文斯·普利察德只是错了吗？并非如此。事实上，虽然在人们安排婚姻时，等级和获得牛的机会不同是有关系的，但在其他任何情况下，它们几乎没有关系。即使在像舞蹈或祭祀这样的正式活动中，也不可能确定谁是 “高于” 其他人的。最重要的是，财富（牛）的差异从来没有转化为发号施令的能力，也没有要求正式的敬意。在一个经常被引用的段落中，埃文斯·普利察德写道。

That every Nuer considers himself as good as his neighbour is evident in their every movement. They strut about like lords of the earth, which, indeed, they consider themselves to be. There is no master and no servant in their society, but only equals who regard themselves as God’s noblest creation … even the suspicion of an order riles a man and he either does not carry it out or he carries it out in a casual and dilatory manner that is more insulting than a refusal.¹⁴

每个努尔人都认为自己和他的邻居一样好，这在他们的一举一动中显而易见。他们像地球的主人一样大摇大摆地走来走去，的确，他们认为自己是地球的主人。在他们的社会中没有主人和仆人，只有平等的人，他们认为自己是上帝最崇高的创造物…… 即使是对命令的怀疑也会激怒一个人，他要么不执行命令，要么以一种随意和拖延的方式执行命令，这比拒绝命令更具侮辱性。¹⁴

Evans-Pritchard is referring here to men. What about women?

埃文斯·普里查德在这里指的是男人。那么女性呢？

While in everyday affairs, Gough found, women operated with much the same independence as men, the marriage system did efface women’s freedom to a degree. If a man paid the forty cattle typically required for bridewealth, this meant above all that he not only had the right to claim paternity over a woman’s children but also acquired exclusive sexual access, which in turn usually meant the right to interfere with his wife’s affairs in other respects as well. However, most Nuer women were not ‘properly’ married. In fact, the complexities of the system were such that a large proportion found themselves officially married to ghosts, or to other women (who could be declared male for genealogical purposes) – in which case, how they went about becoming pregnant and raising their children was nobody’s business but their own. Even in sexual life, then, for women as for men, individual freedom was assumed unless there was some specific reason to curtail it.

高夫发现，虽然在日常事务中，妇女的独立性与男子基本相同，但婚姻制度确实在一定程度上削弱了妇女的自由。如果一个男人支付了通常需要的 40 头牛的聘金，这首先意味着他不仅有权要求成为女人孩子的父亲，而且还能获得专属的性接触权，这反过来又意味着他有权在其他方面干涉妻子的事务。然而，大多数努埃尔族妇女并没有 “适当” 结婚。事实上，由于制度的复杂性，很大一部分人发现自己已经正式嫁给了鬼魂，或者嫁给了其他妇女（为了家谱的目的，她们可以被宣布为男性） —— 在这种情况下，她们如何怀孕和抚养孩子，除了她们自己，没有人可以管。即使在性生活方面，对于女性和男性来说，个人自由也是假定的，除非有一些具体的理由来限制它。

The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.¹⁵ If this is so, we can at least refine our initial question: the real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible simply to laugh them out of court.

抛弃自己的社区的自由，知道自己会在遥远的地方受到欢迎；在社会结构之间来回转换的自由，这取决于一年的时间；不服从当局而不承担后果的自由 —— 所有这些在我们遥远的祖先中似乎都是简单的假设，即使大多数人今天发现它们几乎无法想象。人类可能没有在原始的纯真状态下开始他们的历史，但他们似乎是以一种自觉的厌恶被告知该做什么开始的。¹⁵如果是这样的话，我们至少可以完善我们最初的问题：真正的难题不是酋长，甚至国王和王后何时首次出现，而是何时不再有可能简单地把他们从法庭上嘲笑出去。

Now it is undoubtedly true that, over the broad sweep of history, we find ever larger and more settled populations, ever more powerful forces of production, ever larger material surpluses, and people spending ever more of their time under someone else’s command. It seems reasonable to conclude there is some sort of connection between these trends. But the nature of that connection, and the actual mechanisms, are entirely unclear. In contemporary societies we consider ourselves free people largely because we lack political overlords. For us, it’s simply assumed that what we call ‘the economy’ is organized entirely differently, on the basis not of freedom but ‘efficiency’, and therefore that offices and shop floors are typically arranged in strict chains of command. Unsurprising, then, that so much current speculation on the origins of inequality focuses on economic changes, and particularly the world of work.

现在，毫无疑问，在广泛的历史中，我们发现人口越来越多，越来越定居，生产力量越来越强大，物质盈余越来越多，人们在别人的指挥下花费的时间越来越多，这是事实。我们似乎有理由得出结论，这些趋势之间存在某种联系。但这种联系的性质和实际机制却完全不清楚。在当代社会，我们认为自己是自由人，主要是因为我们没有政治上的霸主。对我们来说，我们只是假设我们所谓的 “经济” 是完全不同的组织，其基础不是自由而是 “效率”，因此，办公室和车间通常是按照严格的指挥链安排的。因此，目前关于不平等的起源的许多猜测都集中在经济变化上，特别是工作领域，这并不令人惊讶。

Here too, we think, much of the available evidence has been widely misconstrued.

我们认为，在这里，许多现有的证据也被广泛地误解了。

A focus on work is not precisely the same as a focus on property, though if one is trying to understand how control of property first came to be translated into power of command, the world of work would be the obvious place to look. By framing the stages of human development largely around the ways people went about acquiring food, men like Adam Smith and Turgot inevitably put work – previously considered a somewhat plebeian concern – centre stage. There was a simple reason for this. It allowed them to claim that their own societies were self-evidently superior, a claim that – at the time – would have been much harder to defend had they used any criterion other than productive labour.¹⁶

对工作的关注与对财产的关注并不完全相同，尽管如果人们试图了解财产的控制权是如何首先转化为指挥权的，工作的世界将是一个明显的地方。亚当·斯密和杜尔哥等人主要围绕人们获取食物的方式来构筑人类发展的阶段，不可避免地将工作 —— 以前被认为是有点平民化的关切 —— 置于中心位置。这有一个简单的原因。这使他们能够宣称自己的社会是不言而喻的优越，而这种宣称 —— 在当时 —— 如果他们使用生产劳动以外的任何标准，就很难辩护。¹⁶

Turgot and Smith began writing this way in the 1750s. They referred to the apex of development as ‘commercial society’, in which a complex division of labour demanded the sacrifice of primitive liberties but guaranteed dazzling increases in overall wealth and prosperity. Over the next several decades, the invention of the spinning jenny, Arkwright loom and, eventually, steam and coal power – and finally the emergence of a permanent (and increasingly self-conscious) industrial working class – completely shifted the terms of debate. Suddenly, there existed forces of production previously undreamed of. But there was also a staggering increase in the number of hours that people were expected to work. In the new mills, twelve- to fifteen-hour days and six-day weeks were considered standard; holidays were minimal. (John Stuart Mill protested that ‘All the labour-saving machinery that has hitherto been invented has not lessened the toil of a single human being.’)

杜尔哥和斯密在 1750 年代开始以这种方式写作。 他们把发展的顶点称为 “商业社会”，在这个社会中，复杂的分工要求牺牲原始的自由，但保证了整体财富和繁荣的惊人增长。在接下来的几十年里，纺纱机、阿克莱特织布机以及最终的蒸汽和煤电的发明 —— 以及最终永久性（和日益自觉的）工业工人阶级的出现 —— 完全改变了辩论的条件。突然间，出现了以前从未梦想过的生产力量。但是，人们的工作时间也有了惊人的增加。在新的工厂里，每天 12 至 15 个小时和每周 6 天的工作时间被认为是标准的；假期也很少。（约翰·斯图亚特·米尔抗议说，“迄今为止，所有节省劳动力的机器都没有减少一个人的劳作”。）

As a result, and over the course of the nineteenth century, almost everyone arguing about the overall direction of human civilization took it for granted that technological progress was the prime mover of history, and that if progress was the story of human liberation, this could only mean liberation from ‘unnecessary toil’: at some future time, science would eventually free us from at least the most degrading, onerous and soul-destroying forms of work. In fact, by the Victorian era many began arguing that this was already happening. Industrialized farming and new labour-saving devices, they claimed, were already leading us towards a world where everyone would enjoy an existence of leisure and affluence – and where we wouldn’t have to spend most of our waking lives running about at someone else’s orders.

因此，在 19 世纪的过程中，几乎所有争论人类文明总体方向的人都想当然地认为，技术进步是历史的主要推动力，如果进步是人类解放的故事，这只能意味着从 “不必要的劳作” 中解放出来：在未来的某个时候，科学将最终使我们至少从最有辱人格、最繁重和最摧残灵魂的工作形式中解脱。事实上，到了维多利亚时代，许多人开始争辩说这已经在发生。他们声称，工业化的农业和新的省力设备已经在引导我们走向一个人人都能享受休闲和富裕生活的世界 —— 在那里，我们不必花大部分清醒的时间听从别人的命令。

Granted, this must have seemed a bizarre claim to radical trade unionists in Chicago who, as late as the 1880s, had to engage in pitched battles with police and company detectives in order to win an eight-hour day – that is, obtain the right to a daily work regime that the average medieval baron would have considered unreasonable to expect of his serfs.¹⁷ Yet, perhaps as a riposte to such campaigns, Victorian intellectuals began arguing that exactly the opposite was true: ‘primitive man’, they posited, had been engaged in a constant struggle for his very existence; life in early human societies was a perpetual chore. European or Chinese or Egyptian peasants toiled from dawn till dusk to eke out a living. And so, it followed, even the awful work regimes of the Dickensian age were actually an improvement on what had come before. All we are arguing about, they insisted, is the pace of improvement. By the dawn of the twentieth century, such reasoning had become universally accepted as common sense.

当然，对于芝加哥的激进工会成员来说，这肯定是一个奇怪的主张，他们在 19 世纪 80 年代就不得不与警察和公司侦探进行激烈的斗争，以赢得八小时工作制 —— 也就是说，获得每天工作制度的权利，一般中世纪的男爵会认为对他的农奴有不合理的要求。¹⁷然而，也许作为对这种运动的反击，维多利亚时代的知识分子开始争论，事实恰恰相反：他们认为，“原始人” 一直在为自己的生存进行不断的斗争；早期人类社会的生活是一个永恒的苦差。欧洲、中国或埃及的农民从黎明到黄昏都在为生计奔波。因此，据此，即使是狄更斯时代的可怕的工作制度，实际上也是对以前的改进。他们坚持认为，我们所争论的只是改进的速度。到 20 世纪初，这种推理已经被普遍接受为常识。

That is what made Marshall Sahlins’s 1968 essay ‘The Original Affluent Society’ such an epochal event, and is why we must now consider both some of its implications and its limitations. Probably the most influential anthropological essay ever written, it turned that old Victorian wisdom – still prevalent in the 1960s – on its head, creating instant discussion and debate, inspiring everyone from socialists to hippies. Whole schools of thought (Primitivism, Degrowth) would likely have never come about without it. But Sahlins was also writing at a time when archaeologists still knew relatively little about pre-agricultural peoples, at least compared to what we know now. It might be best, then, first to take a look at his argument before turning to the evidence we have today and seeing how the piece measures up against it.

这就是马歇尔·萨林斯 1968 年的文章《原始的富裕社会》成为划时代的事件的原因，也是我们现在必须考虑其一些影响和局限性的原因。这篇文章可能是有史以来最具影响力的人类学论文，它颠覆了维多利亚时代的古老智慧 —— 在 20 世纪 60 年代仍然盛行，引起了即时的讨论和辩论，激发了从社会主义者到嬉皮士的所有人。如果没有它，整个思想流派（Primitivism, Degrowth）可能永远不会出现。但萨林斯写作的时候，考古学家对前农业人口的了解还比较少，至少与我们现在的了解相比是如此。因此，最好先看看他的论点，然后再转向我们今天所掌握的证据，看看这篇文章如何与之抗衡。

IN WHICH WE DISCUSS MARSHALL SAHLINS’S ‘ORIGINAL AFFLUENT SOCIETY’ AND REFLECT ON WHAT CAN HAPPEN WHEN EVEN VERY INSIGHTFUL PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT PREHISTORY IN THE ABSENCE OF ACTUAL EVIDENCE

其中我们讨论了马歇尔·萨林斯的 “原始富裕社会”，并反思了在缺乏实际证据的情况下，即使是很有见地的人写史前史，也会发生什么情况。

Marshall Sahlins started his career in the late 1950s as a neo-evolutionist. When ‘The Original Affluent Society’ was published, he was still most famous for his work with Elman Service which proposed four stages of human political development: from bands to tribes, chiefdoms and states. All these terms are still widely used today. In 1968, Sahlins accepted an invitation to spend a year in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s laboratoire in Paris, where, he later reported, he used to eat lunch in the cafeteria each day with Pierre Clastres (who would go on to write Society Against the State), arguing about ethnographic data and whether or not society was ripe for revolution.

马歇尔·萨林斯在 20 世纪 50 年代末作为一个新进化论者开始了他的职业生涯。当《原始的富裕社会》出版时，他最有名的还是他与埃尔曼服务的工作，提出了人类政治发展的四个阶段：从部落到部落、酋长国和国家。所有这些术语今天仍被广泛使用。1968 年，萨林斯接受邀请，在巴黎的克劳德·列维·斯特劳斯的实验室呆了一年，据他后来报告，他每天都和皮埃尔·克拉斯特尔（他后来写了《反国家的社会》）在食堂吃午饭，争论人种学数据和社会是否已经成熟可以进行革命。

These were heady days in French universities, full of student mobilizations and street fighting that ultimately led up to the student/worker insurrection of May 1968 (during which Lévi-Strauss maintained a haughty neutrality, but Sahlins and Clastres became enthusiastic participants). In the midst of all this political ferment, the nature of work, the need for work, the refusal of work, the possibility of gradually eliminating work were all heated matters of debate in both political and intellectual circles.

在法国的大学里，那是一段令人振奋的日子，充满了学生动员和街头斗争，最终导致了 1968 年 5 月的学生/工人暴动（在这期间，列维·斯特劳斯保持着傲慢的中立，但萨林斯和克拉斯特尔成为热情的参与者）。在所有这些政治发酵中，工作的性质、对工作的需要、对工作的拒绝、逐渐消除工作的可能性，都是政治和知识界激烈辩论的问题。

Sahlins’s essay, perhaps the last truly great example of that genre of ‘speculative prehistory’ invented by Rousseau, first appeared in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes .¹⁸ It made the argument that, at least when it comes to working hours, the Victorian narrative of continual improvement is simply backwards. Technological evolution has not liberated people from material necessity. People are not working less. All the evidence, he argued, suggests that over the course of human history the overall number of hours most people spend working has tended instead to increase. Even more provocatively, Sahlins insisted that people in earlier ages were not, necessarily, poorer than modern-day consumers. In fact, he contended, for much of our early history humans might just as easily be said to have lived lives of great material abundance.

萨林斯的文章，也许是卢梭发明的 “推测性史前史” 类型的最后一个真正伟大的例子，首次出现在让·保罗·萨特的杂志《现代时代》上。¹⁸它提出的论点是，至少在工作时间方面，维多利亚时代关于持续改进的叙述是完全倒退的。技术的发展并没有将人们从物质需求中解放出来。人们并没有减少工作。他认为，所有的证据表明，在人类历史上，大多数人花在工作上的总时数反而趋于增加。更具挑衅性的是，萨林斯坚持认为，早期的人们并不一定比现代的消费者更穷。事实上，他认为，在我们早期历史的大部分时间里，人类可能很容易被说成是过着物质丰富的生活。

True, a forager might seem extremely poor by our standards – but to apply our standards was obviously ridiculous. ‘Abundance’ is not an absolute measure. It refers to a situation where one has easy access to everything one feels one needs to live a happy and comfortable life. By those standards, Sahlins argued, most known foragers are rich. The fact that many hunter-gatherers, and even horticulturalists, only seem to have spent somewhere between two and four hours a day doing anything that could be construed as ‘work’ was itself proof of how easy their needs were to satisfy.

诚然，按照我们的标准，一个觅食者可能显得极其贫穷 —— 但采用我们的标准显然是可笑的。富裕 “不是一个绝对的衡量标准。它指的是一种情况，在这种情况下，一个人可以很容易地获得他觉得自己需要的一切，过上幸福和舒适的生活。萨林斯认为，按照这些标准，大多数已知的觅食者都很富有。许多狩猎采集者，甚至园艺家，似乎每天只花两到四个小时做任何可以被理解为 “工作” 的事情，这一事实本身就证明了他们的需求是多么容易满足。

Before continuing, it’s worth saying that the broad picture Sahlins presented appears to be correct. As we pointed out above, the average oppressed medieval serf still worked less than a modern nine-to-five office or factory worker, and the hazelnut gatherers and cattle herders who dragged great slabs to build Stonehenge almost certainly worked, on average, less than that. It’s only very recently that even the richest countries have begun to turn such things around (obviously, most of us are not working as many hours as Victorian stevedores, though the overall decline in working hours is probably not as dramatic as we think). And for much of the world’s population, things are still getting worse instead of better.

在继续之前，值得一提的是，萨林斯提出的大体情况似乎是正确的。正如我们在上面指出的，中世纪受压迫的农奴的平均工作时间仍然低于现代朝九晚五的办公室或工厂工人，而拖着大石板建造巨石阵的榛子采集者和牧牛人的平均工作时间几乎肯定低于这个数字。只是在最近，即使是最富有的国家也开始扭转这种局面（显然，我们大多数人，工作时间没有维多利亚时代的装卸工人那么多，尽管工作时间的整体下降可能没有我们想象的那么戏剧性）。而对于世界上的大部分人口来说，情况仍然在恶化，而不是好转。

What stands the test of time less well is the image that most readers take away from Sahlins’s essay: of happy-go-lucky hunter-gatherers, spending most of their time lounging in the shade, flirting, forming drum circles or telling stories. And this has everything to do with the ethnographic examples he was drawing on, largely the San, Mbuti and Hadza.

不太经得起时间考验的是大多数读者从萨林斯的文章中得到的印象：快乐的狩猎采集者，大部分时间在树荫下闲逛、调情、组成鼓圈或讲故事。而这与他所借鉴的人种学例子有很大关系，主要是桑人、姆布蒂人和哈德扎人。

In the last chapter, we suggested a number of reasons why!Kung San (Bushmen) on the margins of the Kalahari and Hadza of the Serengeti Plateau became so popular in the 1960s as exemplars of what early human society might have been like (despite being quite unusual, as foragers go). One reason was simply the availability of data: by the 1960s, they were among the only foraging populations left who still maintained something like their traditional mode of life. It was also in this decade that anthropologists started carrying out time-allocation studies, recording systematically what members of different societies do over the course of a typical day and how much time they spend doing it.¹⁹ Such research with African foragers also seemed to resonate with the famous discoveries of fossil hominins then being made by Louis and Mary Leakey in other parts of the continent, such as Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Since some of these modern hunter-gatherers were living in savannah-like environments, not unlike the ones in which our species now appeared to have evolved, it was tempting to imagine that here – in these living populations – one might catch a glimpse of human society in something like its original state.

在上一章中，我们提出了一些原因！卡拉哈里沙漠边缘的 Kung San（布须曼人）和塞伦盖蒂高原的 Hadza 在 20 世纪 60 年代作为早期人类社会的典范变得如此受欢迎（尽管就觅食者而言，他们很不寻常）。其中一个原因是数据的可得性：到 20 世纪 60 年代，他们是仅存的仍然保持着类似传统生活方式的觅食人群之一。也是在这十年里，人类学家开始进行时间分配研究，系统地记录不同社会的成员在典型的一天中做什么以及他们花了多少时间。¹⁹对非洲觅食者的这种研究似乎也与路易斯和玛丽·利基当时在非洲大陆其他地区（如坦桑尼亚的奥杜威峡谷）发现的著名人类化石产生了共鸣。由于这些现代狩猎采集者中的一些人生活在类似于大草原的环境中，与我们的物种现在似乎已经进化的环境不一样，所以很容易想象在这里 —— 在这些活着的人群中 —— 人们可能会瞥见人类社会的一些原始状态。

Moreover, the results of those early time-allocation studies came as an enormous surprise. It’s worth bearing in mind that, in the post-war decades, most anthropologists and archaeologists still very much took for granted the old nineteenth-century narrative of humanity’s primordial ‘struggle for existence’. To our ears, much of the rhetoric commonplace at the time, even among the most sophisticated scholars, sounds startlingly condescending: ‘A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat,’ wrote the prehistorian Robert Braidwood in 1957, ‘or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself.’²⁰ Yet these first quantitative studies comprehensively disproved such pronouncements. They showed that, even in quite inhospitable environments like the deserts of Namibia or Botswana, foragers could easily feed everyone in their group and still have three to five days per week left for engaging in such extremely human activities as gossiping, arguing, playing games, dancing or travelling for pleasure.

此外，这些早期的时间分配研究的结果是一个巨大的惊喜。值得注意的是，在战后的几十年里，大多数人类学家和考古学家仍然非常理所当然地认为 19 世纪人类的原始 “生存斗争” 的旧说法。在我们听来，许多当时常见的言辞，甚至在最成熟的学者中，听起来都是令人吃惊的居高临下。 史前学家罗伯特·布雷德伍德在 1957 年写道：“一个人如果一生都在跟踪动物，只是为了杀死它们来吃，或者从一个浆果地移动到另一个浆果地，他实际上就像一个动物一样生活。”²⁰然而，这些最早的定量研究全面地推翻了这种说法。他们表明，即使在像纳米比亚或博茨瓦纳的沙漠这样相当荒凉的环境中，觅食者可以很容易地养活他们群体中的每一个人，并且每周仍然有三到五天的时间来从事诸如闲谈、争论、玩游戏、跳舞或旅行取乐等极其人性化的活动。

Researchers in the 1960s were also beginning to realize that, far from agriculture being some sort of remarkable scientific advance, foragers (who after all tended to be intimately familiar with all aspects of the growing cycles of food plants) were perfectly aware of how one might go about planting and harvesting grains and vegetables. They just didn’t see any reason why they should. ‘Why should we plant,’ one!Kung informant put it – in a phrase cited ever since in a thousand treatises on the origins of farming – ‘when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?’ Indeed, concluded Sahlins, what some prehistorians had assumed to be technical ignorance was really a self-conscious social decision: such foragers had ‘rejected the Neolithic Revolution in order to keep their leisure’.²¹ Anthropologists were still struggling to come to terms with all this when Sahlins stepped in to draw the larger conclusions.

20 世纪 60 年代的研究人员也开始意识到，农业远不是某种了不起的科学进步，觅食者（毕竟他们往往对食物植物生长周期的所有方面都非常熟悉）完全了解人们如何去种植和收获谷物和蔬菜。他们只是不明白为什么要这样做。“我们为什么要种植？”，一位 Kung 知情者说 —— 这句话被无数关于农业起源的论文所引用 —— “世界上有那么多的 mongongo 坚果，我们为什么要种植？” 事实上，萨林斯总结说，一些史前学家认为是技术上的无知，实际上是一种自觉的社会决定：这些觅食者 “拒绝了新石器时代的革命，以保持他们的休闲”。²¹当萨林斯介入并得出更大的结论时，人类学家仍在努力接受这一切。

The ancient forager ethos of leisure (the ‘Zen road to affluence’) only broke down, or so Sahlins surmised, when people finally – for whatever reasons – began to settle in one place and accept the toils of agriculture. They did so at a terrible cost. It wasn’t just ever-increasing hours of toil that followed but, for most, poverty, disease, war and slavery – all fuelled by endless competition and the mindless pursuit of new pleasures, new powers and new forms of wealth. With one deft move, Sahlins’s ‘Original Affluent Society’ used the results of time-allocation studies to pull the rug from under the traditional story of human civilization. Like Woodburn, Sahlins brushes aside Rousseau’s version of the Fall – the idea that, too foolish to reflect on the likely consequences of our actions in assembling, stockpiling and guarding property, we ‘ran blindly for our chains’²² – and takes us straight back to the Garden of Eden. If rejecting farming was a conscious choice, then so was that act of embracing it. We chose to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and for this we were punished. As St Augustine put it, we rebelled against God, and God’s judgment was to cause our own desires to rebel against our rational good sense; our punishment for original sin is the infinity of our new desires.²³

古代觅食者的休闲精神（“通往富裕的禅道”）只有在人们最终 —— 无论出于何种原因 —— 开始在一个地方定居并接受农业的劳作时才会瓦解，或者说萨林斯是这样推测的。他们这样做付出了可怕的代价。随之而来的不仅仅是不断增加的劳作时间，对大多数人来说，还有贫穷、疾病、战争和奴役 —— 所有这些都被无休止的竞争和对新的快乐、新的力量和新的财富形式的无意识追求所助长。萨赫林斯的 “原始富裕社会” 用时间分配研究的结果，从人类文明的传统故事中抽出了一块地毯。像伍德伯恩一样，萨赫林斯把卢梭关于堕落的说法抛在一边 —— 他认为，由于太过愚蠢，无法思考我们在组装、储存和保护财产的行为可能带来的后果，我们 “盲目地奔向我们的枷锁”²²- 并把我们直接带回到，回到伊甸园。如果拒绝耕种是一种有意识的选择，那么拥抱耕种的行为也是如此。我们选择吃知识树上的果子，为此我们受到了惩罚。正如圣奥古斯丁所说，我们叛逆了上帝，而上帝的审判是使我们自己的欲望叛逆了我们的理性良知；我们对原罪的惩罚是我们新欲望的无限大。²³

If there is a fundamental difference here from the biblical story, it’s that the Fall (according to Sahlins) didn’t happen just once. We didn’t collapse and then begin slowly to pull ourselves back up. When it comes to labour and affluence, every new technological breakthrough seems to cause us to fall yet further.

如果说这里与《圣经》故事有什么根本的不同，那就是堕落（根据萨林斯的说法）并不是只发生一次。我们并没有崩溃，然后开始慢慢地把自己拉回来。当涉及到劳动和富裕时，每一个新的技术突破似乎都会使我们进一步堕落。

Sahlins’s piece is a brilliant morality tale. There is, however, one obvious flaw. The whole argument for an ‘original affluent society’ rested on a single fragile premise: that most prehistoric humans really did live in the specific manner of African foragers. As Sahlins was perfectly willing to admit, this was just a guess. In closing his essay, he asked whether ‘marginal hunters such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari’ really were any more representative of the Palaeolithic condition than the foragers of California (who placed great value on hard work) or the Northwest Coast (with their ranked societies and stockpiles of wealth)? Perhaps not, Sahlins conceded.²⁴ This often overlooked observation is crucial. It’s not that Sahlins is suggesting that his own phrase ‘original affluent society’ is incorrect. Rather, he acknowledges that, just as there might have been many ways for free peoples to be free, there might have been more than just one way for (original) affluent societies to be affluent.

萨林斯的作品是一个出色的道德故事。然而，有一个明显的缺陷。整个关于 “原始富裕社会” 的论点建立在一个脆弱的前提上：大多数史前人类确实以非洲牧民的特定方式生活。正如萨林斯完全愿意承认的那样，这只是一种猜测。在文章的最后，他问道：“像卡拉哈里的布须曼人这样的边缘猎手” 是否真的比加利福尼亚（非常重视辛勤工作）或西北海岸（有等级社会和财富储备）的觅食者更能代表旧石器时代的状况？也许不是，萨林斯承认。²⁴这个经常被忽视的观察是至关重要的。这并不是说萨林斯在暗示他自己的 “原始富裕社会” 的说法是不正确的。相反，他承认，正如自由的人民可能有许多方式获得自由一样，（原始）富裕的社会可能有不止一种方式获得富裕。

Not all modern hunter-gatherers value leisure over hard work, just as not all share the easy-going attitudes towards personal possessions of the!Kung or Hadza. Foragers in northwestern California, for instance, were notorious for their cupidity, organizing much of their lives around the accumulation of shell money and sacred treasures and adhering to a stringent work ethic in order to do so. The fisher-foragers of the Canadian Northwest Coast, on the other hand, lived in highly stratified societies where commoners and slaves were famously industrious. According to one of their ethnographers, the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island were not only well housed and fed, but lavishly supplied: ‘Each household made and possessed many mats, boxes, cedar-bark and fur blankets, wooden dishes, horn spoons, and canoes. It was as though in manufacturing as well as in food production there was no point at which further expenditure of effort in the production of more of the same items was felt to be superfluous.’²⁵ Not only did the Kwakiutl surround themselves with endless piles of possessions, but they also put endless creativity into designing and crafting them, with results so striking and intricately beautiful as to make them the pride of ethnographic museums the world over. (Lévi-Strauss remarked that turn-of-the-century Kwakiutl were like a society where a dozen different Picassos were operative all at the same time.) This, surely, is a kind of affluence. But one entirely different from that of the!Kung or Mbuti.

并非所有的现代狩猎采集者都重视休闲而不是辛勤工作，就像并非所有的人都对个人财产抱有轻松的态度！Kung 或 Hadza。例如，加利福尼亚西北部的觅食者因其贪婪而臭名昭著，他们的生活大多围绕着贝壳钱和圣物的积累，并为此坚持严格的工作道德。另一方面，加拿大西北海岸的渔民生活在高度分层的社会中，平民和奴隶都非常勤劳。根据他们的一位民族学家的说法，温哥华岛的 Kwakiutl 人不仅住得好，吃得好，而且供应丰富：“每个家庭都制作并拥有许多垫子、盒子、杉树皮和毛皮毯子、木盘、牛角勺子和独木舟。就好像在制造和食品生产中，没有任何一点会让人觉得进一步花费精力生产更多相同的物品是多余的。²⁵Kwakiutl 人不仅用无穷无尽的财物围绕着自己，而且还用无穷无尽的创造力来设计和制作这些财物，其结果是如此引人注目和复杂美丽，使它们成为全世界民族学博物馆的骄傲。（莱维·斯特劳斯说，本世纪初的 Kwakiutl 人就像一个社会，有一打不同的毕加索同时在工作。）这当然是一种富足。但是，这与 Kung 或 Mbuti 人的情况完全不同。

Which, then, more resembled the original state of human affairs: the easy-going Hadza, or the industrious foragers of northwestern California? By now it will be clear to the reader that this is just the kind of question we shouldn’t be asking. There was no truly ‘original’ state of affairs. Anyone who insists that one exists is by definition trading in myths (Sahlins, at least, was fairly honest about this). Human beings had many tens of thousands of years to experiment with different ways of life, long before any of them turned their hands to agriculture. Instead we might do better to look at the overall direction of change, so as to understand how it bears on our question: how humans came largely to lose the flexibility and freedom that seems once to have characterized our social arrangements, and ended up stuck in permanent relations of dominance and subordination.

那么，哪一个更像人类的原始状态：是随和的哈德萨人，还是加利福尼亚西北部勤劳的觅食者？现在，读者会明白，这正是我们不应该问的那种问题。并不存在真正的 “原始” 状态。任何坚持认为存在原始状态的人，顾名思义都是在进行神话交易（至少萨林斯在这方面是相当诚实的）。人类有几万年的时间来尝试不同的生活方式，在他们中的任何一个人转而从事农业之前很长时间。相反，我们最好看看整体的变化方向，以便理解它如何影响我们的问题：人类如何在很大程度上失去了灵活和自由，而这似乎曾经是我们社会安排的特点，并最终陷入了永久的统治和从属关系。

To do this means continuing the story begun in Chapter Three, following our foraging ancestors out of the Ice Age (or Pleistocene era) into a phase of warmer global climate known as the Holocene. This will also take us far outside Europe, to places like Japan and the Caribbean coast of North America, where entirely new and unsuspected pasts are beginning to emerge; ones which – despite the stubborn efforts of scholars to shoehorn them into neat evolutionary boxes – look about as far from small, nomadic, egalitarian ‘bands’ as one can possibly imagine.

要做到这一点，就意味着继续第三章开始的故事，跟随我们的觅食祖先走出冰河时代（或更新世时代），进入一个被称为全新世的全球气候温暖阶段。这也将把我们带到欧洲以外的地方，如日本和北美的加勒比海岸，那里开始出现全新的和未曾预料到的过去；那些 —— 尽管学者们顽强地将它们塞进整齐的进化盒子里 —— 看起来与人们可能想象的小型、游牧、平等主义的 “族群” 相去甚远。

IN WHICH WE SHOW HOW NEW DISCOVERIES CONCERNING ANCIENT HUNTER-GATHERERS IN NORTH AMERICA AND JAPAN ARE TURNING SOCIAL EVOLUTION ON ITS HEAD

其中我们展示了有关北美和日本古代狩猎采集者的新发现是如何颠覆社会进化的。

In modern-day Louisiana there is a place with the dispiriting name of Poverty Point. Here you can still see the remains of massive earthworks erected by Native Americans around 1600 BC . With its plush green lawns and well-trained coppices, today the site looks like something halfway between a wildlife management area and a golf club.²⁶ Grass-covered mounds and ridges rise neatly from carefully tended meadows, forming concentric rings which suddenly vanish where the Bayou Macon has eroded them away (bayou being derived, via Louisiana French, from the Choctaw word bayuk: marshy rivulets spreading out from the main channel of the Mississippi). Despite nature’s best efforts to obliterate these earthworks, and early European settlers’ best efforts to deny their obvious significance (perhaps these were the dwellings of an ancient race of giants, they conjectured, or one of the lost tribes of Israel?), they endure: evidence for an ancient civilization of the Lower Mississippi and testimony to the scale of its accomplishments.

在现代的路易斯安那州，有一个名字叫 “贫困点” 的地方令人沮丧。在这里，你仍然可以看到美洲原住民在公元前 1600 年左右建立的大规模土楼的遗迹。这里有茂密的绿色草坪和训练有素的灌木丛，今天这里看起来就像野生动物管理区和高尔夫俱乐部的中间地带。²⁶被草覆盖的小丘和山脊从精心照料的草地上整齐地升起，形成同心圆，在马孔河口侵蚀的地方突然消失（河口，bayou这个词是通过路易斯安那州的法语引入的，来自乔克托语的 bayuk：从密西西比河主河道蔓延出来的沼泽小河）。尽管大自然竭力想抹去这些土楼，而且早期的欧洲定居者也竭力否认它们的明显意义（他们猜想，这些也许是古代巨人种族的住所，或者是以色列失落的部落之一），但它们仍然存在：是密西西比河下游古代文明的证据，也是其成就规模的见证。

Archaeologists believe these structures at Poverty Point formed a monumental precinct that once extended over 200 hectares, flanked by two enormous earthen mounds (the so-called Motley and Lower Jackson Mounds) which lie respectively north and south. To clarify what this means, it’s worth noting that the first Eurasian cities – early centres of civic life like Uruk in southern Iraq, or Harappa in the Punjab – began as settlements of roughly 200 hectares in total. Which is to say that their entire layout could fit quite comfortably within the ceremonial precinct of Poverty Point. Like those early Eurasian cities, Poverty Point sprang from a great river, since transport by water, particularly of bulk goods, was in early times infinitely easier than transport by land. Like them, it formed the core of a much larger sphere of cultural interaction. People and resources came to Poverty Point from hundreds of miles away, as far north as the Great Lakes and from the Gulf of Mexico to the south.

考古学家认为，位于贫困点的这些建筑形成了一个纪念碑式的区域，其面积一度超过 200 公顷，两侧是两个巨大的土丘（所谓的莫特利丘和下杰克逊丘），分别位于北部和南部。为了澄清这一点，值得注意的是，最早的欧亚城市 —— 像伊拉克南部的乌鲁克或旁遮普的哈拉帕这样的早期公民生活中心 —— 开始时是总面积约为 200 公顷的定居点。这就是说，他们的整个布局可以很舒适地容纳在贫困点的礼仪区。像那些早期的欧亚城市一样，贫困点也是源于一条大河，因为在早期，水路运输，特别是大宗货物的运输，比陆路运输要容易得多。与他们一样，它形成了一个更大的文化互动领域的核心。人们和资源从数百英里之外来到贫困点，北至大湖区，南至墨西哥湾。

Seen from the air – a ‘god’s-eye’ view – Poverty Point’s standing remains look like some sunken, gargantuan amphitheatre; a place of crowds and power, worthy of any great agrarian civilization. Something approaching a million cubic metres of soil was moved to create its ceremonial infrastructure, which was most likely oriented to the skies, since some of its mounds form enormous figures of birds, inviting the heavens to bear witness to their presence. But the people of Poverty Point weren’t farmers. Nor did they use writing. They were hunters, fishers and foragers, exploiting a superabundance of wild resources (fish, deer, nuts, waterfowl) in the lower reaches of the Mississippi. And they were not the first hunter-gatherers in this region to establish traditions of public architecture. These traditions can be traced back far beyond Poverty Point itself, to around 3500 BC – which is also roughly the time that cities first emerged in Eurasia.

从空中看 —— 一个 “上帝之眼” 的视角 —— 贫困点的遗迹看起来就像某个下沉的巨大的圆形剧场；一个人群和权力的地方，值得表明任何伟大的农业文明。为了建造仪式性的基础设施，人们搬动了近一百万立方米的土壤，这很可能是面向天空的，因为它的一些土堆形成了巨大的鸟的形象，邀请上天见证他们的存在。但贫困点的人不是农民。他们也没有使用文字。他们是猎人、渔民和觅食者，利用密西西比河下游丰富的野生资源（鱼、鹿、坚果、水禽）。而且他们并不是这个地区第一个建立公共建筑传统的狩猎采集者。这些传统可以追溯到遥远的贫困点本身，大约在公元前 3500 年 —— 这也是欧亚大陆首次出现城市的时间。

As archaeologists often point out, Poverty Point is ‘a Stone Age site in an area where there is no stone’, so the staggering quantities of lithic tools, weapons, vessels and lapidary ornaments found there must all have been originally carried from somewhere else.²⁷ The scale of its earthworks implies thousands of people gathering at the site at particular times of year, in numbers outstripping any historically known hunter-gatherer population. Much less clear is what attracted them there with their native copper, flint, quartz crystal, soapstone and other minerals; or how often they came, and how long they stayed. We simply don’t know.

正如考古学家经常指出的那样，贫困点是 “在一个没有石头的地方的石器时代遗址”，所以在那里发现的数量惊人的石器工具、武器、容器和玉石装饰品一定都是最初从其他地方运来。²⁷其土方工程的规模意味着成千上万的人在一年中的特定时间聚集在该地点，其数量超过了历史上已知的任何狩猎·采集人口。不太清楚的是，是什么吸引了他们，他们用当地的铜、燧石、石英晶体、肥皂石和其他矿物吸引了他们；或者他们多长时间来一次，以及他们停留多长时间。我们根本不知道。

What we do know is that Poverty Point arrows and spearheads come in rich hues of red, black, yellow and even blue stone, and these are only the colours we discern. Ancient classifications were no doubt more refined. If stones were being selected with such care, we can only begin to imagine what was going on with cords, fibres, medicines and any living thing in the landscape treated as potential food or poison. Another thing we can be quite sure of is that ‘trade’ is not a useful way to describe whatever was going on here. For one thing, trade goes two ways, and Poverty Point presents no clear evidence for exports, or indeed commodities of any sort. The absence is strikingly obvious to anyone who’s studied the remains of early Eurasian cities like Uruk and Harappa, which do seem to have been engaged in lively trade relations: these sites are awash with industrial quantities of ceramic packaging, and the products of their urban crafts are found far and wide.

我们所知道的是，贫困点的箭和矛头有丰富的红色、黑色、黄色甚至蓝色石头的色调，而这些只是我们辨别的颜色。古代的分类方法无疑更加精细。如果石头被如此仔细地挑选，我们只能开始想象在绳索、纤维、药物和任何被视为潜在食物或毒药的景观中发生了什么。另一件我们可以非常肯定的事情是，“贸易” 并不是描述这里所发生的一切的有效方式。首先，贸易是双向的，而贫困点没有提供出口的明确证据，也没有提供任何种类的商品。对于研究过乌鲁克和哈拉帕等欧亚早期城市遗迹的人来说，这种缺失是非常明显的，这些城市似乎确实参与了活跃的贸易关系：这些遗址中充斥着大量的陶瓷，他们的城市手工业产品被发现得很远很广。

Despite its great cultural reach, there is nothing at all of this commodity culture at Poverty Point. In fact, it’s not clear if anything much was going out from the site, at least in material terms, other than certain enigmatic clay items known as ‘cooking balls’, which can hardly be considered trade goods. Textiles and fabrics may have been important, but we also have to allow for the possibility that Poverty Point’s greatest assets were intangible. Most experts today view its monuments as expressions of sacred geometry, linked to calendar counts and the movement of celestial bodies. If anything was being stockpiled at Poverty Point, it may well have been knowledge: the intellectual property of rituals, vision quests, songs, dances and images.²⁸

尽管其文化影响力很大，但在贫困点根本没有这种商品文化。事实上，除了某些被称为 “烹饪球” 的神秘粘土制品外，还不清楚是否有什么东西从该遗址流出，至少在物质方面，这些东西很难被视为贸易品。纺织品和织物可能很重要，但我们也必须考虑到贫困点最大的资产可能是无形的。今天，大多数专家认为它的纪念碑是神圣的几何学的表现，与日历计数和天体的运动有关。如果有什么东西被储存在贫困点，那很可能是知识：仪式、视觉探索、歌曲、舞蹈和图像的知识财产。²⁸

We can’t possibly know the details. But it’s more than just speculation to say that ancient foragers were exchanging complex information across this entire region, and in a highly controlled fashion. Material proof comes from close examination of the earthen monuments themselves. Through the great valley of the Mississippi, and some considerable way beyond, there exist other smaller sites of the same period. The various configurations of their mounds and ridges adhere to strikingly uniform geometrical principles, based on standard units of measurement and proportion apparently shared by early peoples throughout a significant portion of the Americas. The underlying system of calculus appears to have been based on the transformational properties of equilateral triangles, figured out with the aid of cords and strings, and then extended to the laying-out of massive earthworks.

我们不可能知道这些细节。但如果说古代觅食者在整个地区以高度控制的方式交换复杂的信息，这就不仅仅是推测了。物质证明来自于对土质纪念碑本身的仔细检查。在密西西比河的大河谷中，以及相当长的一段距离之外，还存在着同一时期的其他小型遗址。他们的土丘和山脊的各种配置都遵循惊人的统一的几何原则，基于标准的测量单位和比例，显然是整个美洲大部分地区的早期人民所共有的。基本的微积分系统似乎是基于等边三角形的转换特性，借助绳索和线来计算，然后延伸到大规模土方工程的铺设。

Published in 2004, this remarkable discovery by John E. Clark, an archaeologist and authority on the pre-Columbian societies of Mesoamerica,²⁹ has been greeted by the scholarly community with responses ranging from lukewarm acceptance to plain disbelief, although nobody appears to have actually refuted it. Many prefer simply to ignore it. Clark himself seems surprised by his results. We will return to some wider implications in Chapter Eleven, but for now we can simply note an assessment of Clark’s findings by two specialists in the field, who accept the evidence he presents ‘not only for a standard unit of measurement but also for geometrical layouts and spacing intervals among first-mound complexes from Louisiana to Mexico and Peru, which incorporate multiples of that standard’. At most, finding the same system of measurement across such distances may prove to be ‘one of contemporary archaeology’s most provocative revelations’, and at the very least, they conclude, ‘those who built the works were not simple, ordinary foragers.’³⁰

考古学家和中美洲前哥伦比亚社会的权威约翰·克拉克的这一非凡发现发表于 2004 年。²⁹学术界对这一发现的反应从冷淡的接受到完全不相信，尽管似乎没有人真正反驳它。许多人宁愿直接忽略它。克拉克本人似乎也对他的结果感到惊讶。我们将在第十一章讨论一些更广泛的影响，但现在我们可以简单地注意到该领域的两位专家对克拉克发现的评估，他们接受他提出的证据，“不仅是一个标准的测量单位，还有从路易斯安那州到墨西哥和秘鲁的第一座土丘群的几何布局和间隔，其中包含了该标准的倍数”。最多，在这么远的地方发现相同的测量系统可能被证明是 “当代考古学最具有挑战性的启示之一”，至少，他们得出结论，“那些建造工程的人不是简单、普通的觅食者。”³⁰

Putting aside the (by now irrelevant) notion that there ever was such a thing as ‘simple, ordinary foragers’, it has to be said that, even if Clark’s theory were true only for the Lower Mississippi and surrounding parts of the Eastern Woodlands,³¹ it would still be quite remarkable. For, unless we are dealing with some kind of amazing cosmic coincidence, it means that someone had to convey knowledge of geometric and mathematical techniques for making accurate spatial measurements, and related forms of labour organization, over very long distances. If this were the case, it seems likely that they also shared other forms of knowledge as well: cosmology, geology, philosophy, medicine, ethics, fauna, flora, ideas about property, social structure, and aesthetics.

撇开 “简单的、普通的觅食者” 这一概念（现在已经无关紧要了），不得不说，即使克拉克的理论只在密西西比河下游和东部林地的周边地区是真的。³¹它仍将是相当了不起的。因为，除非我们处理的是某种惊人的宇宙巧合，否则这意味着有人必须在非常长的距离内传递关于精确空间测量的几何和数学技术知识，以及相关的劳动组织形式。如果是这样的话，他们似乎也有可能分享其他形式的知识：宇宙学、地质学、哲学、医学、伦理学、动物群、植物群、关于财产的想法、社会结构和美学。

In the case of Poverty Point, should this be conceived as a form of exchange of knowledge for material goods? Possibly. But the movement of objects and ideas might have been organized any number of other ways as well. All we know for sure is that the lack of an agricultural base does not seem to have stopped those who gathered on Poverty Point from creating something that to us would appear very much like little cities which, at least during certain times of year, hosted a rich and influential intellectual life.

就 “贫困点” 而言，这应该被视为一种以知识换取物质产品的形式？有可能。但物品和思想的流动也可能是以任何其他方式组织的。我们可以肯定的是，缺乏农业基础似乎并没有阻止那些聚集在贫困点的人创造一些对我们来说非常像小城市的东西，至少在一年中的某些时候，这些小城市承载着丰富而有影响力的知识生活。

Today, Poverty Point is a National Park and Monument and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Despite these designations of international importance, its implications for world history have hardly begun to be explored. A hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state, Poverty Point makes the Anatolian complex of Göbekli Tepe look like little more than a ‘potbelly hill’ (which is, in fact, what ‘Göbekli Tepe’ means in Turkish). Yet outside a small community of academic specialists, and of course local residents and visitors, very few people have heard of it.

今天，贫困点是一个国家公园和纪念碑，也是联合国教科文组织的世界遗产地。尽管这些指定的国际重要性，它对世界历史的影响几乎没有开始被探索。作为一个美索不达米亚城邦大小的狩猎采集者大都市，贫困点让安纳托利亚的 Göbekli Tepe 建筑群看起来不过是一座 “大肚子山”（事实上，这就是 Göbekli Tepe 在土耳其语中的意思）。然而，除了一小群学术专家，当然还有当地居民和游客，很少有人听说过它。

The obvious question at this juncture must surely be: why isn’t Poverty Point better known to audiences the world over? Why doesn’t it feature more prominently (or at all) in discussions on the origins of urban life, centralization and their consequences for human history?

在这个时候，一个明显的问题肯定是：为什么贫困点没有被全世界的观众更好地了解？为什么在关于城市生活的起源、中央集权及其对人类历史的影响的讨论中，它没有占据更突出的位置（或根本没有）？

One reason, no doubt, is that Poverty Point and its predecessors (like the much older mound complex at Watson’s Brake, in the nearby Ouachita basin) have been placed in a phase of American prehistory known as the ‘Archaic’. The Archaic period covers an immense span of time, between the flooding of the Beringia land bridge (which once linked Eurasia to the Americas) around 8000 BC, and the initial adoption and spread of maize-farming in certain parts of North America, down to around 1000 BC . One word, for seven millennia of indigenous history. Archaeologists who first gave the period its name – which is really more of a chronological slap in the face – were basically declaring, ‘this is the period before anything particularly important was happening.’ So when undeniable evidence began to appear that all sorts of important things were indeed happening, and not just in the Mississippi basin, it was almost something of an archaeological embarrassment.

毫无疑问，原因之一是贫困点和它的前身（如附近瓦奇塔盆地的沃森布瑞克更古老的土丘群）被置于美洲史前史的一个阶段，即 “古世纪”。古代时期涵盖了一个巨大的时间跨度，从公元前 8000 年左右白令谷陆桥（曾经连接欧亚大陆和美洲）被淹没，到北美某些地区最初采用和传播玉米种植，一直到公元前 1000 年左右。一个词，代表了七千年的本土历史。最初给这个时期命名的考古学家 —— 这实际上更像是在打脸 —— 基本上是在宣称，“这是发生任何特别重要的事情之前的时期。” 因此，当不可否认的证据开始出现，表明各种重要的事情确实在发生，而且不仅仅是在密西西比河流域，这几乎是一种考古学上的尴尬。

On the shores of the Atlantic and around the Gulf of Mexico lie enigmatic structures: just as remarkable as Poverty Point, but even less well known. Formed out of shell in great accumulations, they range from small rings to massive U-shaped ‘amphitheatres’ like those of St Johns River valley in Northeast Florida. These were no natural features. They too were built spaces where hunter-gatherer publics once assembled in their thousands. Far to the north and west, on the other side of the continent, more surprises loom up from the windswept shores of British Columbia: settlements and fortifications of striking magnitude, dating back as far as 2000 BC, facing a Pacific already familiar with the spectacle of war and long-range commerce.³²

在大西洋海岸和墨西哥湾周围，有一些神秘的结构：和贫困点一样引人注目，但甚至不为人所知。它们由贝壳大量堆积而成，范围从小型环形到巨大的 U 形 “圆形剧场”，如佛罗里达州东北部的圣约翰河谷。这些都不是自然特征。它们也都是建成的空间，狩猎采集者曾经在这里聚集了成千上万的人。在大陆另一端的北部和西部，不列颠哥伦比亚省风吹日晒的海岸上出现了更多的惊喜：规模惊人的定居点和防御工事，最早可追溯到公元前 2000 年，面对的是已经熟悉战争和远程商业景象的太平洋。³²

On the matter of hunter-gatherer history, North America isn’t the only part of the world where evolutionary expectations are heading for a titanic collision with the archaeological record. In Japan and neighbouring islands, another monolithic cultural designation – ‘Jōmon’ – holds sway over more than 10,000 years of forager history, from around 14,000 BC to 300 BC . Japanese archaeologists spend much time subdividing the Jōmon period in ways just as intricate as the more pioneering North American scholars now do with their ‘Archaic’. Everyone else, however, whether museumgoers or readers of high-school textbooks, is still confronted with the stark singularity of the term ‘Jōmon’, which, covering the long ages before rice-farming came to Japan, leaves us with an impression of drab conservatism, a time when nothing really happened. New archaeological discoveries are now revealing just how wrong this is.

在狩猎·采集者的历史问题上，北美并不是世界上唯一一个进化期望与考古记录发生巨大碰撞的地区。在日本和邻近的岛屿，另一个单一的文化名称 —— 绳文（Jōmon） —— 支配着从公元前 14000 年到公元前 300 年的一万多年的狩猎历史。日本的考古学家花了很多时间来细分绳文时期，其方式就像现在北美学者对他们的 “Archaic” 所做的那样错综复杂。然而，其他所有人，无论是博物馆的观众还是高中教科书的读者，都仍然面临着 “绳文” 这个术语的明显的单一性，它涵盖了稻米耕作传入日本之前的漫长岁月，给我们留下了单调保守的印象，一个没有真正发生任何事情的时代。现在，新的考古发现揭示了这是多么错误。

The creation of a new Japanese national past is a somewhat paradoxical side effect of modernization. Since Japan’s economic take-off in the 1960s, many thousands of archaeological sites have been discovered, excavated and meticulously recorded, either as a result of construction projects for roads, railways, housing or nuclear plants or as part of immense rescue efforts undertaken in the wake of environmental catastrophes such as the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. The result is an immense archive of archaeological information. What begins to emerge from this data-labyrinth is an entirely different picture of what society was like before irrigated rice cultivation came to Japan from the Korean Peninsula.

创造一个新的日本民族历史是现代化的一个有点矛盾的副作用。自 20 世纪 60 年代日本经济起飞以来，数以千计的考古遗址被发现、挖掘和精心记录，这要么是公路、铁路、住房或核电站建设项目的结果，要么是在 2011 年东北地震等环境灾难发生后进行的巨大救援工作的一部分。其结果是一个巨大的考古学信息档案。从这个数据迷宫中开始出现的是一幅完全不同的画面，即在灌溉水稻种植从朝鲜半岛传到日本之前，社会是什么样子。

Across the Japanese archipelago, between 14,000 and 300 BC, centennial cycles of settlement nucleation and dispersal came and went; monuments shot up in wood and stone, and then were pulled down again or abandoned; elaborate ritual traditions, including opulent burials, flourished and declined; specialized crafts waxed and waned, including remarkable accomplishments in the arts of pottery, wood and lacquer. In traditions of wild food procurement, strong regional contrasts are evident, ranging from maritime adaptations to acorn-based economies, both using large storage facilities for gathered resources. Cannabis came into use, for fibres and recreational drug use. There were enormous villages with grand storehouses and what seem to be ritual precincts, such as those found at Sannai Maruyama.³³

在整个日本群岛，从公元前 14000 年到公元前 300 年，定居者的成群结队和分散的百年周期来了又去；木头和石头的纪念碑拔地而起，然后又被拆除或遗弃；精心设计的仪式传统，包括华丽的葬礼，盛极而衰；专门的手工艺盛极而衰，包括陶器、木材和漆器艺术方面的显著成就。在采购野生食物的传统中，强烈的地区对比是显而易见的，从海洋适应性到基于橡子的经济，两者都使用大型储存设施来收集资源。大麻开始被使用，用于纤维和娱乐性药物的使用。这里有巨大的村庄，有宏伟的仓库和似乎是仪式的场所，例如在三井丸山发现的那些。³³

An entire, forgotten social history of pre-agricultural Japan is resurfacing, for now largely as a mass of data points and state heritage archives. In future, as the bits get pieced back together, who knows what will come into view?

整个被遗忘的日本前农业时代的社会历史正在重新浮现，目前主要是作为大量的数据点和国家遗产档案。在未来，随着这些碎片被重新拼凑起来，谁知道会出现什么呢？

Europe, too, bears witness to the vibrant and complex history of non-agricultural peoples after the Ice Age. Take the monuments called in Finnish Jätinkirkko, the ‘Giants’ Churches’ of the Bothnian Sea between Sweden and Finland: great stone ramparts, some up to 195 feet long, raised up in their tens by coastal foragers between 3000 and 2000 BC . Or the ‘Big Idol’, a seventeen-foot-tall totem pole with elaborate carvings rescued from a peat bog on the shores of Lake Shigirskoe, on the eastern slopes of the Central Urals. Dating to around 8000 BC, the Idol is the lone survivor of a long-lost tradition of large-scale wooden forager art which once produced monuments that presided over northern skies. Then come the amber-soaked burials of Karelia and southern Scandinavia, with their elaborate grave goods and corpses staged in expressive poses, echoing some forgotten etiquette of Mesolithic vintage.³⁴ And, as we’ve seen, even the major building phases of Stonehenge, long associated with early farmers, are now dated to a time when cereal cultivation was virtually abandoned and hazelnut-gathering once again took over in the British Isles, alongside livestock-herding.

欧洲也见证了冰河时代后非农业民族充满活力的复杂历史。以芬兰语中称为 Jätinkirkko 的纪念碑为例，它是瑞典和芬兰之间博特尼亚海的 “巨人教堂”：巨大的石墙，有些长达 195 英尺，是由沿海的觅食者在公元前 3000 年至 2000 年之间竖起的数十座石墙。还有 “大偶像”，一个 17 英尺高的图腾柱，上面有精心雕刻的图案，是在中乌拉尔山脉东坡的希吉尔斯科湖岸边的泥炭沼泽中被救出来的。偶像的历史可以追溯到公元前 8000 年左右，它是失传已久的大型木质觅食者艺术传统的唯一幸存者，该传统曾经产生了主持北方天空的纪念碑。然后是卡累利阿和斯堪的纳维亚南部的琥珀浸泡的墓葬，其精心制作的墓具和尸体摆出的表情，呼应了中石器时代的一些被遗忘的礼仪。³⁴而且，正如我们所看到的，即使是长期以来与早期农民有关的巨石阵的主要建筑阶段，现在也可以追溯到谷物种植几乎被放弃，榛子采集再次在不列颠群岛与牲畜放牧一起被接管的时代。

Back in North America, some researchers are beginning to talk, a little awkwardly, of the ‘New Archaic’, a hitherto unsuspected era of ‘monuments without kings’.³⁵ But the truth is that we still know precious little of the political systems lying behind a now almost globally attested phenomenon of forager monumentality, or indeed whether some of those monumental projects might have involved kings or other kinds of leaders. What we do know is that this changes forever the nature of the conversation about social evolution in the Americas, Japan, Europe, and no doubt most other places too. Clearly, foragers didn’t shuffle backstage at the close of the last Ice Age, waiting in the wings for some group of Neolithic farmers to reopen the theatre of history. Why, then, is this new knowledge so rarely integrated into our accounts of the human past? Why does almost everyone (everyone, at least, who is not a specialist on Archaic North America or Jōmon Japan) still write as if such things were impossible before the coming of agriculture?

在北美，一些研究人员开始有点尴尬地谈论 “新古时代”，一个迄今未被发现的 “没有国王的纪念碑” 的时代。³⁵但事实是，我们对现在几乎在全球范围内得到证实的觅食者纪念碑现象背后的政治制度仍然知之甚少，或者说，这些纪念碑项目中是否有国王或其他类型的领导人参与。我们所知道的是，这永远改变了关于美洲、日本、欧洲以及毫无疑问大多数其他地方的社会进化的对话的性质。显然，觅食者并没有在最后一个冰河时代结束时在后台洗牌，等待一些新石器时代的农民重新开启历史的舞台。那么，为什么这些新知识很少被纳入我们对人类历史的描述中呢？为什么几乎每一个人（至少是每一个不是研究北美古人类或日本绳文的专家的人）都还在写，好像在农业到来之前这些事情是不可能的？

Of course, those of us with no access to archaeological reports can be excused. What information exists more widely tends to be restricted to scattered, and sometimes sensationalized, news summaries that are very hard to put together into a single picture. Scholars and professional researchers, on the other hand, have to actually make a considerable effort to remain so ignorant. Let us consider for a moment some of the peculiar forms of intellectual acrobatics required.

当然，我们这些没有机会看到考古报告的人可以原谅。更广泛存在的信息往往局限于零散的，有时是耸人听闻的新闻摘要，很难拼凑成一张图片。另一方面，学者和专业研究人员实际上必须做出相当大的努力才能保持这种无知。让我们暂时考虑一下所需的一些特殊形式的智力杂技。

HOW THE MYTH THAT FORAGERS LIVE IN A STATE OF INFANTILE SIMPLICITY IS KEPT ALIVE TODAY (OR, INFORMAL FALLACIES)

觅食者生活在幼稚的简单状态中的神话是如何保持到今天的（或者，非正式的谬论

Let’s first ask why even some experts apparently find it so difficult to shake off the idea of the carefree, idle forager band; and the twin assumption that ‘civilization’ properly so called – towns, specialized craftspeople, specialists in esoteric knowledge – would be impossible without agriculture. Why would anyone continue to write history as if places like Poverty Point could never have existed? It can’t just be the whimsical result of airy academic terminologies (‘Archaic’, ‘Jōmon’ and so on). The real answer, we suggest, has more to do with the legacy of European colonial expansion; and in particular its impact on both indigenous and European systems of thought, especially with regard to the expression of rights of property in land.

让我们首先问一下，为什么连一些专家都明显发现很难摆脱无忧无虑、无所事事的觅食者队伍的想法；以及没有农业就不可能有所谓的 “文明” —— 城镇、专业工匠、深奥知识的专家 —— 的双重假设。为什么会有人继续写历史，好像像贫困点这样的地方永远不可能存在？这不可能只是空洞的学术术语（“古”、“Jōmon” 等）的异想天开。我们认为，真正的答案与欧洲殖民扩张的遗产有关；特别是它对本土和欧洲思想体系的影响，尤其是在土地产权的表达方面。

Recall how – long before Sahlins’s notion of the ‘original affluent society’ – indigenous critics of European civilization were already arguing that hunter-gatherers were really better off than other people because they could obtain the things they wanted and needed so easily. Such views can be found as early as the sixteenth century – remember, for instance, the Mi’kmaq interlocutors who annoyed Père Biard so much by insisting they were richer than the French, for exactly that reason. Kandiaronk made similar arguments, insisting ‘the Savages of Canada, notwithstanding their Poverty, are richer than you, among whom all sorts of crimes are committed upon the score of Mine and Thine.’³⁶

回顾一下 —— 早在萨林斯的 “原始富裕社会” 的概念之前 —— 欧洲文明的本土批评者已经在争论，狩猎采集者确实比其他人更富裕，因为他们可以很容易地获得他们想要和需要的东西。这种观点早在十六世纪就可以找到 —— 例如，记得米克马克的对话者，他们坚持认为他们比法国人更富有，正是因为这个原因，他们才会如此恼火。坎迪阿伦克也提出了类似的论点，坚持认为 “加拿大的野蛮人，尽管他们很穷，但比你们更富有，在他们中间，各种罪行都是以我的和你的为标准。³⁶

As we’ve seen, indigenous critics like Kandiaronk, caught in the rhetorical moment, would frequently overstate their case, even playing along with the idea that they were blissful, innocent children of nature. They did this in order to expose what they considered the bizarre perversions of the European lifestyle. The irony is that, in doing so, they often played into the hands of those who argued that – being blissful and innocent children of nature – they also had no natural rights to their land.

正如我们所看到的，像坎迪阿伦克这样的原住民批评家，在修辞的时刻，会经常夸大他们的情况，甚至玩弄他们是幸福的、无辜的自然之子的想法。他们这样做是为了揭露他们所认为的欧洲生活方式的怪异变态。具有讽刺意味的是，在这样做的过程中，他们常常被那些认为 —— 作为自然界的幸福和无辜的孩子 —— 他们对自己的土地也没有自然权利的人所利用。

Here it’s important to understand a little of the legal basis for dispossessing people who had the misfortune already to be living in territories coveted by European settlers. This was, almost invariably, what nineteenth-century jurists came to call the ‘Agricultural Argument’, a principle which has played a major role in the displacement of untold thousands of indigenous peoples from ancestral lands in Australia, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas: processes typically accompanied by the rape, torture and mass murder of human beings, and often the destruction of entire civilizations.

在这里，有必要了解一下剥夺那些不幸生活在欧洲定居者觊觎的领土上的人们的法律依据。这几乎无一例外地是十九世纪的法学家所称的 “农业论点”，这一原则在澳大利亚、新西兰、撒哈拉以南非洲和美洲数以千计的原住民被赶出祖先的土地中发挥了重要作用：这一过程通常伴随着对人类的强奸、酷刑和大规模谋杀，而且往往是对整个文明的破坏。

Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging peoples really were living in a State of Nature – which meant that they were deemed to be part of the land but had no legal claims to own it. The entire basis for dispossession, in turn, was premised on the idea that the current inhabitants of those lands weren’t really working. The argument goes back to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690), in which he argued that property rights are necessarily derived from labour. In working the land, one ‘mixes one’s labour’ with it; in this way it becomes, in a sense, an extension of oneself. Lazy natives, according to Locke’s disciples, didn’t do that. They were not, Lockeans claimed, ‘improving landlords’ but simply made use of the land to satisfy their basic needs with the minimum of effort. James Tully, an authority on indigenous rights, spells out the historical implications: land used for hunting and gathering was considered vacant, and ‘if the Aboriginal peoples attempt to subject the Europeans to their laws and customs or to defend the territories that they have mistakenly believed to be their property for thousands of years, then it is they who violate natural law and may be punished or “destroyed” like savage beasts.’³⁷ In a similar way, the stereotype of the carefree, lazy native, coasting through a life free from material ambition, was deployed by thousands of European conquerors, plantation overseers and colonial officials in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania as a pretext for the use of bureaucratic terror to force local people into work: everything from outright enslavement to punitive tax regimes, corvée labour and debt peonage.

殖民者对原住民土地的侵占往往始于某种笼统的断言，即觅食者确实生活在自然状态中 —— 这意味着他们被认为是土地的一部分，但在法律上没有拥有土地的权利。反过来，剥夺土地的整个基础是以这些土地的现有居民没有真正的工作为前提的。这一论点可以追溯到约翰·洛克的《政府第二论》（1690 年），他在其中认为，产权必然来自劳动。在耕种土地时，人们将自己的劳动与土地 “混合” 在一起；在某种意义上，土地成为自己的延伸。洛克的弟子认为，懒惰的当地人并没有这样做。洛克主义者声称，他们不是 “改良的地主”，而只是利用土地，以最小的努力满足他们的基本需求。原住民权利的权威詹姆斯·塔利阐述了历史影响：用于狩猎和采集的土地被认为是空置的，“如果原住民试图让欧洲人遵守他们的法律和习俗，或者捍卫他们几千年来错误地认为是自己财产的领土，那么违反自然法的是他们，可能会像野蛮的野兽一样受到惩罚或被 ‘毁灭’。”³⁷同样，无忧无虑、懒惰的本地人，在没有物质野心的生活中游刃有余的刻板印象，被亚洲、非洲、拉丁美洲和大洋洲成千上万的欧洲征服者、种植园监督者和殖民官员用来作为使用官僚恐怖手段迫使当地人工作的借口：从直接奴役到惩罚性税收制度、徭役和债务奴役。

As indigenous legal scholars have been pointing out for years, the ‘Agricultural Argument’ makes no sense, even on its own terms. There are many ways, other than European-style farming, in which to care for and improve the productivity of land. What to a settler’s eye seemed savage, untouched wilderness usually turns out to be landscapes actively managed by indigenous populations for thousands of years through controlled burning, weeding, coppicing, fertilizing and pruning, terracing estuarine plots to extend the habitat of particular wild flora, building clam gardens in intertidal zones to enhance the reproduction of shellfish, creating weirs to catch salmon, bass and sturgeon, and so on. Such procedures were often labour-intensive, and regulated by indigenous laws governing who could access groves, swamps, root beds, grasslands and fishing grounds, and who was entitled to exploit what species at any given time of year. In parts of Australia, these indigenous techniques of land management were such that, according to one recent study, we should stop speaking of ‘foraging’ altogether, and refer instead to a different sort of farming.³⁸

正如本土法律学者多年来一直指出的那样，“农业论证” 即使就其本身而言也是毫无意义的。除了欧洲式的耕作之外，还有很多方法可以照顾和提高土地的生产力。在定居者眼里似乎是野蛮的、无人问津的荒野，结果通常是原住民几千年来积极管理的地貌，通过控制燃烧、除草、砍树、施肥和修剪，在河口地块上修筑梯田以扩大特定野生植物的栖息地，在潮间带建造蛤蜊园以加强贝类的繁殖，建立堰塘以捕捉鲑鱼、鲈鱼和鲟鱼，等等。这些程序往往是劳动密集型的，并由土著法律规定谁可以进入小树林、沼泽地、根床、草原和渔场，以及谁有权在一年中的任何特定时间开发什么物种。在澳大利亚部分地区，这些本土的土地管理技术，根据最近的一项研究，我们应该完全停止谈论 “觅食”，而是指一种不同的耕作方式。³⁸

Such societies might not have recognized private property rights in the same sense as Roman Law or English Common Law, but it’s absurd to argue they had no property rights at all. They simply had different conceptions of property. This is true, incidentally, even of people like the Hadza or!Kung; and, as we will see, many other foraging peoples actually had extraordinarily complex and sophisticated conceptions of ownership. Sometimes these indigenous property systems formed the basis for differential access to resources, with the result that something like social classes emerged.³⁹ Usually, though, this did not happen, because people made sure that it didn’t, much as they made sure chiefs did not develop coercive power.

这样的社会可能不承认与罗马法或英国普通法相同意义上的私有产权，但如果说他们根本没有产权，那是荒谬的。他们只是对财产有不同的概念。顺便说一下，即使像哈德萨人或！孔人也是如此；而且，正如我们将看到的，许多其他觅食民族实际上有非常复杂和精密的所有权概念。有时，这些本土的财产制度构成了不同的资源使用权的基础，其结果是出现了类似社会阶层的东西。³⁹但通常情况下，这种情况不会发生，因为人们确保它不会发生，就像他们确保酋长不会形成强制力一样。

We should nonetheless recognize that the economic base of at least some foraging societies was capable of supporting anything from priestly castes to royal courts with standing armies. Let us take just one dramatic example to illustrate the point.

然而，我们应该认识到，至少一些觅食社会的经济基础能够支持从祭司阶层到拥有常备军的皇家法庭的任何东西。让我们仅举一个戏剧性的例子来说明这一点。

One of the first North American societies described by European explorers in the sixteenth century were the Calusa, a non-agricultural people who inhabited the west coast of Florida, from Tampa Bay to the Keys. There they had established a small kingdom, ruled from a capital town called Calos, which today is marked by a thirty-hectare complex of high shell mounds known as Mound Key. Fish, shellfish and larger marine animals comprised a major part of the Calusa diet, supplemented by deer, raccoon and a variety of birds. Calusa also maintained a fleet of war canoes with which they would launch military raids on nearby populations, extracting processed foods, skins, weapons, amber, metals and slaves as tribute. When Juan Ponce de León entered Charlotte Harbor on 4 June 1513 he was met by a well-organized flotilla of such canoes, manned by heavily armed hunter-gatherers.

欧洲探险家在十六世纪描述的第一批北美社会之一是卡鲁萨人，他们是居住在佛罗里达州西海岸，从坦帕湾到群岛的非农业民族。他们在那里建立了一个小王国，由一个叫卡洛斯的首府统治，今天这里有一个占地 30 公顷的，由高大的贝壳丘组成，被称为丘基。鱼、贝类和较大的海洋动物是卡鲁萨人饮食的主要部分，此外还有鹿、浣熊和各种鸟类。卡鲁萨人还保持着一支战争独木舟舰队，他们用这些独木舟对附近的居民发动军事袭击，提取加工食品、皮毛、武器、琥珀、金属和奴隶作为贡品。1513 年 6 月 4 日，当胡安·庞塞·德·莱昂进入夏洛特港时，他遇到了一支组织严密的独木舟船队，由全副武装的狩猎采集者操纵。

Some historians resist calling the Calusa leader a ‘king’, preferring terms like ‘paramount chief’, but first-hand accounts leave no doubt about his exalted status. The man known as ‘Carlos’, the ruler of Calos at the time of initial European contact, even looked like a European king: he wore a gold diadem and beaded leg bands and sat on a wooden throne – and, crucially, he was the only Calusa allowed to do so. His powers seemed absolute. ‘His will was law, and insubordination was punishable by death.’⁴⁰ He was also responsible for performing secret rituals that ensured the renewal of nature. His subjects always greeted him by kneeling and raising their hands in a gesture of obeisance, and he was typically accompanied by representatives of the ruling class of warrior nobles and priests who, like him, devoted themselves largely to the business of government. And he had at his disposal the services of specialized craftsmen, including court metallurgists who worked silver, gold and copper.

一些历史学家不愿意称卡卢萨领导人为 “国王”，他们更喜欢用 “最高酋长” 这样的术语，但第一手资料显示，他的地位之高是毋庸置疑的。被称为 “卡洛斯” 的人，在最初与欧洲人接触时是卡卢萨的统治者，他甚至看起来像一个欧洲国王：他戴着金质头饰和珠子腿带，坐在木质王座上 —— 而且，关键是，他是唯一被允许这样做的卡卢萨人。他的权力似乎是绝对的。他的意志就是法律，不服从命令的人将被处以死刑。⁴⁰他还负责举行秘密仪式，确保自然界的更新。他的臣民在迎接他的时候总是跪下来，举起手来表示敬意，他的身边通常有武士贵族和牧师组成的统治阶级的代表，他们和他一样，主要致力于政府的事务。他还拥有专业工匠的服务，包括加工银、金和铜的宫廷冶金师。

Spanish observers reported a traditional practice: that on the death of a Calusa ruler, or of his principal wife, a certain quota of their subjects’ sons and daughters had to be put to death. By most definitions, all this would make Carlos not just a king, but a sacred king, perhaps divine.⁴¹ We know less about the economic basis for these arrangements, but court life appears to have been made possible not only by complex systems of access to coastal fishing grounds, which were exceedingly rich, but also by canals and artificial ponds dug out of the coastal everglades. The latter, in turn, allowed for permanent – that is, non-seasonal – settlements (though most Calusa did still scatter to fishing and gathering sites at certain times of year, when the big towns grew decidedly smaller).⁴²

西班牙观察员报告了一个传统做法：卡鲁萨统治者或其主要妻子死亡时，其臣民的儿子和女儿必须有一定的配额被处死。根据大多数定义，所有这些将使卡洛斯不仅是一个国王，而且是一个神圣的国王，也许是圣洁的。⁴¹我们对这些安排的经济基础知之甚少，但宫廷生活似乎不仅通过复杂的沿海渔场准入系统得以实现，这些渔场非常丰富，而且还通过从沿海沼泽地挖出的运河和人工池塘来实现。后者又允许永久 —— 即非季节性 —— 定居（尽管大多数卡鲁萨人在一年中的某些时候仍然分散到捕鱼和采集地点，这时大城镇明显变小）。⁴²

By all accounts, then, the Calusa had indeed ‘got stuck’ in a single economic and political mode that allowed extreme forms of inequality to emerge. But they did so without ever planting a single seed or tethering a single animal. Confronted with such cases, adherents of the view that agriculture was a necessary foundation for durable inequalities have two options: ignore them, or claim they represent some kind of insignificant anomaly. Surely, they will say, foragers who do these kinds of things – raiding their neighbours, stockpiling wealth, creating elaborate court ceremonial, defending their territories and so on – aren’t really foragers at all, or at least not true foragers. Surely they must be farmers by other means, effectively practising agriculture (just with wild crops), or perhaps somehow caught in a moment of transition, ‘on the way’ to becoming farmers, just not yet having quite arrived?

从各方面来看，卡鲁萨人确实 “困在” 一个单一的经济和政治模式中，使极端形式的不平等得以出现。但他们在这样做的时候，并没有种下一粒种子或拴住一只动物。面对这样的案例，认为农业是持久不平等的必要基础的观点的追随者有两个选择：忽视它们，或者声称它们代表某种无足轻重的反常现象。当然，他们会说，做这些事情的觅食者 —— 突袭邻居、储存财富、创造精致的宫廷仪式、保卫领土等等 —— 根本就不是真正的觅食者，或者至少不是真正的觅食者。当然，他们必须通过其他方式成为农民，有效地从事农业（只是使用野生作物），或者也许在某种程度上处于过渡时期，“正在成为农民的路上”，只是还没有完全到达？

All these are excellent examples of what Antony Flew called the ‘No True Scotsman’ style of argument (also known to logicians as the ‘ad hoc rescue’ procedure). For those unfamiliar with it, it works like this:

所有这些都是安东尼·弗莱所说的 “没有真正的苏格兰人” 的论证方式（也被逻辑学家称为 “特别救援” 程序）的绝佳例子。对于那些不熟悉它的人来说，它是这样工作的。

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the ‘Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again’. Hamish is shocked and declares that ‘No Scotsman would do such a thing.’ The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again; and, this time, finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion, but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says: ‘No true Scotsman would do such a thing.’⁴³

想象一下，苏格兰人哈米什·麦克唐纳坐着下来，手里拿着《格拉斯哥晨报》，看到一篇关于 “布莱顿性爱狂人再次出击” 的文章。哈米什很震惊，并宣称 “没有一个苏格兰人会做这样的事情”。第二天，他又坐下来阅读《格拉斯哥先驱晨报》；这一次，他发现了一篇关于一个阿伯丁人的文章，他的残暴行为使布莱顿的性爱狂人看起来几乎很有绅士风度。这一事实表明，哈米什的看法是错误的，但他会承认这一点吗？不可能。这一次他说：“没有一个真正的苏格兰人会做这样的事情。⁴³

Philosophers frown on this style of argumentation as a classic ‘informal fallacy’, or variety of circular argument. You simply assert a proposition (e.g. ‘hunter-gatherers do not have aristocracies’), then protect it from any possible counter-examples by continually changing the definition. We prefer a consistent approach.

哲学家们认为这种论证方式是典型的 “非正式谬误”，或各种循环论证。你只是简单地断言一个命题（例如 “狩猎采集者没有贵族制度”），然后通过不断地改变定义来保护它不受任何可能的反例影响。我们更喜欢一致的方法。

Foragers are populations which don’t rely on biologically domesticated plants and animals as their primary sources of food. Therefore, if it becomes apparent that a good number of them have in fact possessed complex systems of land tenure, or worshipped kings, or practised slavery, this altered picture of their activities doesn’t somehow magically turn them into ‘proto-farmers’. Nor does it justify the invention of endless sub-categories like ‘complex’ or ‘affluent’ or ‘delayed-return’ hunter-gatherers, which is simply another way of ensuring such peoples are kept in what the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot called the ‘savage slot’, their histories defined and circumscribed by their mode of subsistence – as if they were people who really ought to be lazing around all day, but for some reason got ahead of themselves.⁴⁴ Instead, it means that the initial assertion was, like that of the apocryphal Hamish McDonald, simply wrong.

觅食者是不依赖生物驯化的植物和动物作为其主要食物来源的人群。因此，如果他们中的很多人实际上拥有复杂的土地所有权制度，或崇拜国王，或，这种对他们活动的改变并不能神奇地将他们变成 “原农民”。它也不能成为发明 “复杂的” 或 “富裕的” 或 “延迟返回的” 狩猎采集者等无尽子类别的理由，这只是确保这些民族被保留在海地人类学家米歇尔·罗尔夫·特鲁伊洛所说的 “野蛮槽” 中的另一种方式，他们的历史被他们的生存方式所定义和限定 —— 就好像他们是真正应该整天闲逛的人，但由于某种原因却超越了自己。⁴⁴相反，这意味着最初的断言就像启示录中的哈米什·麦克唐纳的断言一样，是完全错误的。

IN WHICH WE DISPOSE OF ONE PARTICULARLY SILLY ARGUMENT THAT FORAGERS WHO SETTLE IN TERRITORIES THAT LEND THEMSELVES WELL TO FORAGING ARE SOMEHOW UNUSUAL

其中，我们处理了一个特别愚蠢的论点，即定居在适合觅食的地区的觅食者在某种程度上是不寻常的。

In academic thought, there’s another popular way of propping up the myth of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and thereby writing off people like the Calusa as evolutionary quirks or anomalies. This is to claim that they only behaved the way they did because they were living in ‘atypical’ environments. Usually, what’s meant by ‘atypical’ are wetlands of various sorts – coasts and river valleys – as opposed to the remoter corners of tropical forests or desert margins, which is assumed to be where hunter-gatherers really ought to be living, since that is where most of them live today. It is a particularly weird argument, but a lot of very serious people make it, so we’ll briefly have to take it on.

在学术界，还有一种流行的方法来支持 “农业革命” 的神话，从而把卡鲁萨人这样的人写成进化的怪癖或异常现象。这就是声称他们的行为方式只是因为他们生活在 “非典型” 环境中。通常，“非典型” 是指各种湿地 —— 海岸和河谷 —— 而不是热带森林或沙漠边缘的偏远角落，这被认为是狩猎采集者真正应该生活的地方，因为那是他们中大多数人今天生活的地方。这是一个特别奇怪的论点，但很多非常严肃的人都这么说，所以我们将简要地接受它。

Anyone who was still living mainly by hunting animals and gathering wild foodstuffs in the early to mid twentieth century was almost certainly living on land no one else particularly wanted. That’s why so many of the best descriptions of foragers come from places like the Kalahari Desert or Arctic Circle. Ten thousand years ago, this was obviously not the case. Everyone was a forager; overall population densities were low. Foragers were therefore free to live in pretty much any sort of territory they fancied. All things being equal, those living off wild resources would tend to cleave to places where they were abundant. You would think this is self-evident, but apparently it isn’t.

在 20 世纪初至中期，任何仍然主要靠猎杀动物和采集野生食物为生的人，几乎可以肯定是生活在别人并不特别想要的土地上。这就是为什么这么多关于觅食者的最佳描述来自卡拉哈里沙漠或北极圈等地方。一万年前，这个，显然不是这样的。每个人都是觅食者；总体人口密度很低。因此，觅食者可以自由地生活在他们喜欢的任何类型的地区。在所有条件相同的情况下，那些靠野生资源生活的人往往会聚集在资源丰富的地方。你会认为这是不言而喻的，但显然这不是。

Those who today describe people like the Calusa as ‘atypical’ because they had such a prosperous resource base want us to believe, instead, that ancient foragers chose to avoid locations of this kind, shunning the rivers and coasts (which also offered natural arteries for movement and communication), because they were so keen to oblige later researchers by resembling twentieth-century hunter-gatherers (the sort for which detailed scientific data is available today). We are asked to believe that it was only after they ran out of deserts and mountains and rainforests that they reluctantly started to colonize richer and more comfortable environments. We might call this the ‘all the bad spots are taken!’ argument.

那些今天把像卡卢萨人这样的人描述为 “非典型” 的人，因为他们有如此繁荣的资源基础，反而要我们相信，古代的觅食者选择避开这种地方，避开河流和海岸（这也提供了移动和交流的自然动脉），因为他们非常希望通过类似于二十世纪的狩猎采集者（今天有详细科学数据的那种）来满足后来研究者的要求。我们被要求相信，只是在他们用完了沙漠、山脉和雨林之后，他们才不情愿地开始殖民更丰富和更舒适的环境。我们可以把这称为 “所有不好的地方都被占领了！” 的说法。

In fact, there was nothing atypical about the Calusa. They were just one of many fisher-forager populations living around the Straits of Florida – including the Tequesta, Pojoy, Jeaga, Jobe and Ais (some apparently ruled by dynasties of their own) – with whom Calusa conducted regular trade, fought wars and arranged dynastic marriages. They were also among the first Native American societies to be destroyed since, for obvious reasons, coasts and estuaries were the first spots where Spanish colonizers landed, bringing epidemic diseases, priests, tribute and, eventually, settlers. This was a pattern repeated on every continent, from America to Oceania, where invariably the most attractive ports, harbours, fisheries and surrounding lands were first snapped up by British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch or Russian settlers, who also drained tidal salt marshes and coastal lagoons to farm cereals and cash crops.⁴⁵

事实上，卡卢萨人并没有什么非典型性。他们只是生活在佛罗里达海峡周围的众多渔民群体之一，包括特克斯塔人、波乔伊人、杰加人、乔布人和艾斯人（有些人显然有自己的王朝统治），卡鲁萨人与他们进行定期贸易，打仗和安排王朝的婚姻。他们也是最早被摧毁的美洲原住民社会之一，因为出于明显的原因，海岸和河口是西班牙殖民者最先登陆的地方，他们带来了流行病、牧师、贡品和最终的定居者。这种模式在从美洲到大洋洲的每个大陆上都在重复，在那里，最有吸引力的港口、海港、渔场和周围的土地首先被英国、法国、葡萄牙、西班牙、荷兰或俄罗斯的定居者抢走，他们还抽干潮汐盐沼和沿海泻湖的水来种植谷物和经济作物。⁴⁵

Such was the fate of the Calusa and their ancient fishing and hunting grounds. When Florida was ceded to the British in the mid eighteenth century, the last handful of surviving subjects from the kingdom of Calos were shipped off to the Caribbean by their Spanish masters.

这就是卡卢萨人和他们古老的渔猎地的命运。当佛罗里达州在十八世纪中期被割让给英国时，卡卢萨王国最后几位幸存的臣民被他们的西班牙主人运到了加勒比海。

For most of human history, fishers, hunters and foragers did not have to contend with expansive empires; therefore, they themselves tended to be the most active human colonizers of aquatic environments. Archaeological evidence increasingly bears this out. It was long thought, for instance, that the Americas were first settled by humans travelling mainly over land (the so-called ‘Clovis people’). Around 13,000 years ago they were supposed to have followed an arduous crossing from Beringia, the land bridge between Russia and Alaska, passing south between terrestrial glaciers, over frozen mountains – all because, for some reason, it never occurred to any of them to build a boat and follow the coast.

在人类历史的大部分时间里，渔民、猎人和觅食者不必与庞大的帝国抗衡；因此，他们自己往往是水生环境中最活跃的人类殖民者。考古学证据越来越证明了这一点。例如，长期以来，人们认为美洲是由主要在陆地上旅行的人类（所谓的 “克洛维斯人”）首次定居。大约 1.3 万年前，他们被认为是从俄罗斯和阿拉斯加之间的陆桥白令牙出发，在陆地冰川之间向南经过，越过冰冻的山脉 —— 所有这些都是因为，出于某种原因，他们中没有人想到要造一艘船，沿着海岸走。

More recent evidence suggests a very different picture (or, as one Navajo informant put it when faced with an archaeological map of the terrestrial route via Beringia: ‘maybe some other guys came over like that, but us Navajos came a different way’).⁴⁶

最近的证据表明了一个非常不同的情况（或者，正如一位纳瓦霍人的信息提供者在面对经过白令海峡的陆地路线的考古地图时所说：“也许其他一些人是这样过来的，但我们纳瓦霍人是走另一条路的”）。⁴⁶

In fact, Eurasian populations made a much earlier entry to what was then a genuinely ‘New World’, some 17,000 years ago. What was more, they did indeed think to build boats, following a coastal route that passed around the Pacific Rim, hopping between offshore islands and linear patches of kelp forest and ending somewhere on the southern coast of Chile. Early eastward crossings also took place.⁴⁷ Of course, it’s possible that these first Americans, on arriving in such rich coastal habitats, quickly abandoned them, preferring for some obscure reason to spend the rest of their lives climbing mountains, hacking their way through forests and trekking across endless monotonous prairies. But it seems more plausible to assume that the bulk of them stayed exactly where they were, often forming dense and stable settlements in such locations.

事实上，欧亚人更早地进入了当时真正的 “新世界”，距今约 17000 年。更重要的是，他们确实想到了造船，沿着一条沿海路线，绕过环太平洋地区，在近海岛屿和成片的海带森林之间跳跃，最后到达智利南部海岸的某个地方。早期的东渡也发生过。⁴⁷当然，有可能这些第一批美洲人在到达如此丰富的沿海栖息地后，很快就放弃了这些栖息地，出于某种隐晦的原因，他们更愿意用余生去爬山，砍伐森林，在无尽的单调的草原上跋涉。但似乎更有可能的是，他们中的大部分人完全呆在原地，经常在这些地方形成密集和稳定的定居点。

The problem is, until recently this has always been an argument from silence, since rising sea levels long ago submerged the earliest records of shoreline habitation in most parts of the world. Archaeologists have tended to resist the conclusion that such habitations must have existed despite the lack of physical remains; but, with advances in the investigation of underwater environments, the case is growing stronger. A distinctly soggier (but also frankly more commonsensical) account of early human dispersal and settlement is finally becoming possible.⁴⁸

问题是，直到最近，这一直是一个沉默的论点，因为海平面上升早已淹没了世界上大部分地区最早的海岸线居住记录。考古学家倾向于抵制这样的结论，即尽管缺乏物理遗迹，但这种居住地一定存在；但是，随着对水下环境调查的进展，这种情况越来越强烈。对早期人类的散布和定居，一个明显的、更有活力的（但也坦率地说是更符合常识的）说法终于成为可能。⁴⁸

IN WHICH WE FINALLY RETURN TO THE QUESTION OF PROPERTY, AND INQUIRE AS TO ITS RELATION TO THE SACRED

在其中，我们最终回到了财产问题，并询问了它与神圣的关系。

All this means that, of the many distinct cultural universes beginning to take shape across the world in the Early Holocene, most were likely centred on environments of abundance rather than scarcity: more like the Calusa’s than the!Kung’s. Does this also mean they were likely to have similar political arrangements to the Calusa? Here some caution is in order.

所有这些都意味着，在全新世早期开始在世界各地形成的许多独特的文化世界中，大多数可能是以丰富而不是匮乏的环境为中心的：更像卡鲁萨人，而不是孔氏人。这是否也意味着他们可能有与卡鲁萨人类似的政治安排？这里需要谨慎。

That the Calusa managed to maintain a sufficient economic surplus to support what looks to us like a miniature kingdom does not mean such an outcome is inevitable as soon as a society is capable of stockpiling a sufficient quantity of fish. After all, the Calusa were seafaring people; they would have undoubtedly been familiar with kingdoms ruled by divine monarchs like the Great Sun of the Natchez in nearby Louisiana and, likely as not, the empires of Central America. It’s possible they were simply imitating more powerful neighbours. Or maybe they were just odd. Finally, we don’t really know how much power even a divine king like Carlos really had. Here it’s useful to consider the Natchez themselves: an agricultural group, much better documented than the Calusa, and with a spectacular and purportedly absolute monarch of their own.

卡鲁萨人设法保持了足够的经济盈余，以支持在我们看来是一个微型王国，但这并不意味着只要一个社会有能力储存足够数量的鱼，这样的结果就是不可避免的。毕竟，卡鲁萨人是航海者；他们无疑熟悉由神圣的君主统治的王国，如附近路易斯安那州纳奇兹的大太阳，以及中美洲的帝国。有可能他们只是在模仿更强大的邻居。或者，他们只是很奇怪。最后，我们不知道像卡洛斯这样的神性国王到底有多少权力。在这里，考虑一下纳奇兹人本身是很有用的：他们是一个农业群体，比卡鲁萨人有更多的记载，而且有一个壮观的、据说是绝对的君主。

The Natchez Sun, as the monarch was known, inhabited a village in which he appeared to wield unlimited power. His every movement was greeted by elaborate rituals of deference, bowing and scraping; he could order arbitrary executions, help himself to any of his subjects’ possessions, do pretty much anything he liked. Still, this power was strictly limited by his own physical presence, which in turn was largely confined to the royal village itself. Most Natchez did not live in the royal village (indeed, most tended to avoid the place, for obvious reasons); outside it, royal representatives were treated no more seriously than Montagnais-Naskapi chiefs. If subjects weren’t inclined to obey these representatives’ orders, they simply laughed at them. In other words, while the court of the Natchez Sun was not pure empty theatre – those executed by the Great Sun were most definitely dead – neither was it the court of Suleiman the Magnificent or Aurangzeb. It seems to have been something almost precisely in between.

被称为 “纳奇兹太阳” 的君主居住在一个村庄里，他似乎拥有无限权力。他的一举一动都受到精心设计的恭敬、鞠躬和刮目相看的仪式的欢迎；他可以下令任意处决，帮助自己获得任何臣民的财产，做几乎任何他喜欢的事情。不过，这种权力还是受到他本人的实际存在的严格限制，而这种存在又在很大程度上局限于皇家村庄本身。大多数纳奇兹人并不住在王室村里（事实上，出于明显的原因，大多数人倾向于避开这个地方）；在王室村外，王室代表受到的待遇并不比蒙塔格奈·纳斯卡皮族酋长更严肃。如果臣民不愿意服从这些代表的命令，他们只是嘲笑他们。换句话说，虽然纳奇兹太阳的宫廷不是纯粹的空荡档，被大太阳处决的人肯定是死了，但也不是苏莱曼大帝或奥朗泽布的宫廷。它似乎是一种几乎正好介于两者之间的东西。

Was Calusa kingship a similar arrangement? Spanish observers clearly didn’t think so (they regarded it as a more or less absolute monarchy), but since typically half the point of such deadly theatrics is to impress outsiders, that tells us very little in itself.⁴⁹

卡鲁萨人的王权是类似的安排吗？西班牙观察员显然不这么认为（他们认为这是一个或多或少的绝对君主制），但由于通常这种致命的戏剧性的一半是为了给外人留下印象，这本身并不能告诉我们什么。⁴⁹

What have we learned so far?

到目前为止，我们已经学到了什么？

Most obviously, that we can now put a final nail in the coffin of the prevailing view that human beings lived more or less like Kalahari Bushmen, until the invention of agriculture sent everything askew. Even were it possible to write off Pleistocene mammoth hunters as some kind of strange anomaly, the same clearly cannot be said for the period that immediately followed the glaciers’ retreat, when dozens of new societies began to form along resource-rich coasts, estuaries and river valleys, gathering in large and often permanent settlements, creating entirely new industries, building monuments according to mathematical principles, developing regional cuisines, and so on.

最明显的是，我们现在可以在主流观点的棺材上钉上最后一颗钉子，即在农业发明之前，人类或多或少地像卡拉哈里布什曼人一样生活，这使一切都变得不正常。即使有可能把更新世的猛犸象猎人当作某种奇怪的反常现象来注销，但对于紧随冰川退却之后的那段时期，显然也不能这么说，当时有几十个新的社会开始沿着资源丰富的海岸、河口和河谷形成，他们聚集在大型且通常是永久性的定居点，创造全新的产业，根据数学原理建造纪念碑，发展地区性的美食，等等。

We have also learned that at least some of these societies developed a material infrastructure capable of supporting royal courts and standing armies – even though we have, as yet, no clear evidence that they actually did so. To construct the earthworks at Poverty Point, for instance, must have taken enormous amounts of human labour and a strict regime of carefully planned-out work, but we still have little idea how that labour was organized. Japanese archaeologists, surveying thousands of years’ worth of Jōmon sites, have discovered all sorts of treasures, but they are yet to find indisputable evidence that those treasures were monopolized by any sort of aristocracy or ruling elite.

我们还了解到，这些社会中至少有一些发展了能够支持皇家法庭和常备军的物质基础设施 —— 尽管我们还没有明确的证据表明他们真的这样做了。例如，在贫困点建造土方工程，肯定需要大量的人力和精心策划的严格的工作制度，但我们仍然不知道这些劳动是如何组织的。日本考古学家在勘察了几千年的绳文遗址后，发现了各种各样的宝物，但他们还没有找到无可争议的证据，证明这些宝物被任何一种贵族或统治精英所垄断。

We cannot possibly know exactly which forms of ownership existed in these societies. What we can suggest, and there’s plenty of evidence to support it, is that all the places in question – Poverty Point, Sannai Maruyama, the Kastelli Giant’s Church in Finland, or indeed the earlier resting places of Upper Palaeolithic grandees – were in some sense sacred places. This might not seem like saying very much, but it’s important: it tells us a lot more about the ‘origins’ of private property than is generally assumed. In rounding off this discussion, we will try to explain why.

我们不可能确切知道在这些社会中存在哪种形式的所有权。我们可以说的是，而且有大量的证据支持，所有这些地方 —— 贫困点、Sannai Maruyama、芬兰的 Kastelli 巨人教堂，或者实际上是旧石器时代上部大人物的早期休息地 —— 在某种意义上是神圣的地方。这可能看起来说得不多，但它很重要：它告诉我们关于私有财产的 “起源”，比一般的假设多得多。在这次讨论的最后，我们将尝试解释原因。

Let’s turn again to the anthropologist James Woodburn, and a less well-known insight from his work on ‘immediate return’ hunter-gatherers. Even among those forager groups, famous for their assertive egalitarianism, he notes, there was one striking exception to the rule that no adult should ever presume to give direct orders to another, and that individuals should not lay private claim to property. This exception came in the sphere of ritual, of the sacred. In Hadza religion and the religions of many Pygmy groups, initiation into male (and sometimes female) cults forms the basis of exclusive claims to ownership, usually of ritual privileges, that stand in absolute contrast to the minimization of exclusive property rights in everyday, secular life. These various forms of ritual and intellectual property, Woodburn observed, are generally protected by secrecy, by deception and often by the threat of violence.⁵⁰

让我们再来看看人类学家詹姆斯·伍德伯恩，以及他在研究 “立即返回” 的狩猎采集者时提出的一个不太知名的见解。他指出，即使在那些以其自信的平等主义而闻名的觅食者群体中，也有一个引人注目的例外，即任何成年人都不应该妄想直接命令他人，个人不应该对财产提出私人要求。这个例外出现在仪式、神圣的领域。在哈德扎宗教和许多俾格米群体的宗教中，加入男性（有时是女性）崇拜构成了对所有权的专属要求的基础，通常是仪式上的特权，这与日常、世俗生活中专属产权的最小化形成绝对的对比。伍德伯恩观察到，这些不同形式的仪式和知识产权，通常是通过保密、欺骗和经常的暴力威胁来保护。⁵⁰

Here, Woodburn cites the sacred trumpets that initiated males of certain Pygmy groups keep hidden in secret places in the forest. Not only are women and children not supposed to know about such sacred treasures; should any follow the men to spy on them, they would be attacked or even raped.⁵¹ Strikingly similar practices involving sacred trumpets, sacred flutes or other fairly obvious phallic symbols are commonplace in certain contemporary societies of Papua New Guinea and Amazonia. Very often there is a complex game of secrets, whereby the instruments are periodically taken out of their hiding places and men pretend they are the voices of spirits, or use them as part of costumed masquerades in which they impersonate spirits to terrify women and children.⁵²

在这里，伍德伯恩引用了某些俾格米人群体的男性在森林中的秘密地点所藏的神圣的喇叭声。不仅妇女和儿童不应该知道这种神圣的宝藏；如果有任何一个人跟着男人去偷看他们，他们就会受到攻击甚至被强奸。⁵¹在巴布亚新几内亚和亚马逊的某些当代社会中，涉及神圣的小号、神圣的长笛或其他相当明显的阳性符号的惊人的类似做法很常见。很多时候，有一种复杂的秘密游戏，即定期将这些乐器从藏身处拿出来，男人们假装它们是神灵的声音，或者将它们作为化装舞会的一部分，在舞会上冒充神灵来吓唬妇女和儿童。⁵²

Now, these sacred items are, in many cases, the only important and exclusive forms of property that exist in societies where personal autonomy is taken to be a paramount value, or what we may simply call ‘free societies’. It’s not just relations of command that are strictly confined to sacred contexts, or even occasions when humans impersonate spirits; so too is absolute – or what we would today refer to as ‘private’ – property. In such societies, there turns out to be a profound formal similarity between the notion of private property and the notion of the sacred. Both are, essentially, structures of exclusion.

现在，在许多情况下，这些神圣的物品是存在于个人自主权被认为是最重要的价值的社会中的唯一重要和排他的财产形式，或者我们可以简单地称之为 “自由社会”。不仅仅是严格限制在神圣背景下的命令关系，甚至是人类冒充神灵的场合；绝对的 —— 或者我们今天所说的 “私人” —— 财产也是如此。在这样的社会中，私人财产的概念和神圣的概念之间原来有深刻的形式上的相似性。从本质上讲，两者都是排斥性的结构。

Much of this is implicit – if never clearly stated or developed – in Émile Durkheim’s classic definition of ‘the sacred’ as that which is ‘set apart’: removed from the world, and placed on a pedestal, at some times literally and at other times figuratively, because of its imperceptible connection with a higher force or being. Durkheim argued that the clearest expression of the sacred was the Polynesian term tabu, meaning ‘not to be touched’. But when we speak of absolute, private property, are we not talking about something very similar – almost identical in fact, in its underlying logic and social effects?

在埃米尔·杜克海姆对 “神圣” 的经典定义中，大部分内容都是隐含的 —— 尽管从未明确说明或发展过 —— “神圣” 是指被 “分开” 的东西：从世界中移除，并被置于基座上，有时是字面上的，有时是象征性的，因为它与更高的力量或存在有着不可感知的联系。杜克海姆神圣的最清晰的表达是波利尼西亚的术语Tabu，意思是 “不可触碰”。但是，当我们谈论绝对的私有财产时，我们是不是在谈论一些非常相似的东西 —— 事实上，在其基本逻辑和社会影响方面几乎是相同的？

As British legal theorists like to put it, individual property rights are held, notionally at least, ‘against the whole world’. If you own a car, you have the right to prevent anyone in the entire world from entering or using it. (If you think about it, this is the only right you have in your car that’s really absolute. Almost anything else you can do with a car is strictly regulated: where and how you can drive it, park it, and so forth. But you can keep absolutely anyone else in the world from getting inside it.) In this case the object is set apart, fenced about by invisible or visible barriers – not because it is tied to some supernatural being, but because it’s sacred to a specific, living human individual. In other respects, the logic is much the same.

正如英国法律理论家喜欢说的那样，至少在理论上，个人财产权是 “针对整个世界” 的。如果你拥有一辆车，你有权阻止全世界的任何人进入或使用它。（如果你想一想，这是你对你的汽车拥有的唯一真正绝对的权利。你对汽车所能做的其他事情几乎都有严格的规定：你可以在哪里以及如何驾驶它，停放它，等等。但你绝对可以阻止世界上任何其他人进入车内。）在这种情况下，物体被分开，被无形或有形的障碍物围起来 —— 不是因为它与某种超自然的存在有关，而是因为它对一个特定的、活生生的人类个体是神圣的。在其他方面，其逻辑是非常相同的。

To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that – quite unlike free societies – we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms. This is what the political scientist C. B. Macpherson meant by ‘possessive individualism’. Just as every man’s home is his castle, so your right not to be killed, tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned rests on the idea that you own your own body, just as you own your chattels and possessions, and legally have the right to exclude others from your land, or house, or car, and so on.⁵³ As we’ve seen, those who did not share this particular European conception of the sacred could indeed be killed, tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned – and, from Amazonia to Oceania, they often were.⁵⁴

认识到私有财产和神圣概念之间的密切相似之处，也就认识到了欧洲社会思想在历史上的怪异之处。这就是 —— 与自由社会完全不同 —— 我们把私有财产的这种绝对的、神圣的品质作为所有人类权利和自由的典范。这就是政治学家 C·B·麦弗逊所说的 “占有型个人主义”。正如每个人的家都是他的城堡一样，你不被杀害、折磨或任意监禁的权利建立在你拥有自己的身体的想法上，就像你拥有你的动产和财物一样，并且在法律上有权利排除其他人进入你的土地、房屋或汽车，等等。⁵³正如我们所看到的，那些不认同这种特殊的欧洲神圣概念的人确实可以被杀害、折磨或任意监禁 —— 而且，从亚马逊到大洋洲，他们经常这样。⁵⁴

For most Native American societies, this kind of attitude was profoundly alien. If it applied anywhere at all, then it was only with regard to sacred objects, or what the anthropologist Robert Lowie termed ‘sacra’ when he pointed out long ago that many of the most important forms of indigenous property were immaterial or incorporeal: magic formulae, stories, medical knowledge, the right to perform a certain dance, or stitch a certain pattern on one’s mantle. It was often the case that weapons, tools and even territories used to hunt game were freely shared – but the esoteric powers to safeguard the reproduction of game from one season to the next, or ensure luck in the chase, were individually owned and jealously guarded.⁵⁵

对于大多数美洲原住民社会来说，这种态度是非常陌生的。如果它适用于任何地方，那么它只适用于圣物，或者人类学家罗伯特·洛维所说的 “圣物”，他很早就指出，许多最重要的土著财产形式是非物质的或无体的：魔法公式、故事、医学知识、表演某种舞蹈的权利，或在自己的斗篷上缝制某种图案。通常的情况是，用于狩猎的武器、工具甚至领地都是自由分享的 —— 但保障猎物从一个季节到下一个季节的繁衍，或确保追逐中的运气的神秘力量，则是个人拥有的，并受到严格保护。⁵⁵

Quite often, sacra have both material and immaterial elements; as among the Kwakiutl, where ownership of an heirloom wooden feast-dish also conveyed the right to gather berries on a certain stretch of land with which to fill it; which in turn afforded its owner the right to present those berries while singing a certain song at a certain feast, and so forth.⁵⁶ Such forms of sacred property are endlessly complex and variable. Among Plains societies of North America, for instance, sacred bundles (which normally included not only physical objects but accompanying dances, rituals and songs) were often the only objects in that society to be treated as private property: not just owned exclusively by individuals, but also inherited, bought and sold.⁵⁷

很多时候，神圣财产既有物质因素，也有非物质因素；如在 Kwakiutl 人中，拥有一个传世的木制餐盘，也就意味着有权在某片土地上采集浆果来填充它；而这又使其主人有权在某次宴会上唱某首歌时展示这些浆果，等等。⁵⁶这种神圣财产的形式是无尽的复杂和多变的。例如，在北美的平原社会中，神圣的捆绑物（通常不仅包括实物，还包括伴随的舞蹈、仪式和歌曲）往往是该社会中唯一被视为私有财产的物品：不仅由个人独家拥有，还可以继承、购买和出售。⁵⁷

Often, the true ‘owners’ of land or other natural resources were said to be gods or spirits; mortal humans are merely squatters, poachers, or at best caretakers. People variously adopted a predatory attitude to resources – as with hunters, who appropriate what really belongs to the gods – or that of a caretaker (where one is only the ‘owner’ or ‘master’ of a village, or men’s house, or stretch of territory if one is ultimately responsible for maintaining and looking after it). Sometimes these attitudes coexist, as in Amazonia, where the paradigm for ownership (or ‘mastery’ – it’s always the same word) involves capturing wild animals and then adopting them as pets; that is, precisely the point where violent appropriation of the natural world turns into nurture or ‘taking care’.⁵⁸

通常情况下，土地或其他自然资源的真正 “所有者” 据说是神或精灵；凡人只是擅自占用者、偷猎者，或者最多只是看守者。人们对资源采取不同的掠夺性态度 —— 如猎人，他们占有真正属于神灵的东西 —— 或看守人的态度（如果一个人最终负责维护和照看一个村庄、或男人的房子、或一片领土，他才是 “主人” 或 “主人”）。有时这些态度并存，比如在亚马逊地区，所有权（或 “掌握” —— 总是同一个词）的范式涉及捕捉野生动物，然后将它们作为宠物收养；也就是说，正是对自然世界的暴力占有变成了养育或 “照顾”。⁵⁸

It is not unusual for ethnographers working with indigenous Amazonian societies to discover that almost everything around them has an owner, or could potentially be owned, from lakes and mountains to cultivars, liana groves and animals. As ethnographers also note, such ownership always carries a double meaning of domination and care. To be without an owner is to be exposed, unprotected.⁵⁹ In what anthropologists refer to as totemic systems, of the kind we discussed for Australia and North America, the responsibility of care takes on a particularly extreme form. Each human clan is said to ‘own’ a certain species of animal – thus making them the ‘Bear clan’, ‘Elk clan’, ‘Eagle clan’ and so forth – but what this means is precisely that members of that clan cannot hunt, kill, harm or otherwise consume animals of that species. In fact, they are expected to take part in rituals that promote its existence and make it flourish.

与亚马逊原住民社会一起工作的民族志学者经常会发现，他们周围的一切几乎都有主人，或者有可能被拥有，从湖泊和山脉，到栽培品种、藤本植物林和动物。正如民族学家们所指出的，这种所有权总是带有支配和照顾的双重含义。没有主人就意味着暴露，不受保护。⁵⁹在人类学家所说的图腾制度中，就像我们讨论的澳大利亚和北美的那种图腾制度，照顾的责任采取了一种特别极端的形式。据说每个人类部族都 “拥有” 某种动物 —— 从而使他们成为 “熊部族”、“麋鹿部族”、“鹰部族” 等等 —— 但这恰恰意味着该部族的成员不能狩猎、杀害、伤害或以其他方式消费该物种的动物。事实上，他们应该参加促进其存在并使其繁荣的仪式。

What makes the Roman Law conception of property – the basis of almost all legal systems today – unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will.

罗马法的财产概念 —— 今天几乎所有法律制度的基础 —— 的独特之处在于，照顾和分享的责任被降低到最低限度，甚至完全消除。在罗马法中，有三种与占有有关的基本权利：usus（使用权）、fructus（享受财产产品的权利，例如树的果实）和abusus（损害或破坏的权利）。如果一个人只拥有前两项权利，这被称为用益权，在法律上不被视为真正的占有。那么，真正的合法财产的决定性特征是，人们可以选择不照顾它，甚至可以随意毁坏它。

We are now, finally, approaching a general conclusion about the coming of private property, which can be illustrated by one last and especially striking example: the famous initiation rituals of the Australian Western Desert. Here adult males of each clan act as guardians or custodians of particular territories. There are certain sacra, known as churinga or tsurinja by the Aranda, which are relics of ancestors who effectively created each clan’s territory in ancient times. Mostly, they are smoothed pieces of wood or stone inscribed with a totemic emblem. The same objects could also embody legal title to those lands. Émile Durkheim considered them the very archetype of the sacred: things set apart from the ordinary world and accorded pious devotion; effectively, the ‘Holy Ark of the clan’.⁶⁰

现在，我们终于接近了关于私有财产到来的一般结论，这可以通过最后一个特别引人注目的例子来说明：澳大利亚西部沙漠中著名的入会仪式。在这里，每个部族的成年男性都是特定领地的守护者或监护人。有一些 Sacra，阿兰达人称之为 churinga 或 tsurinja，它们是古代有效地创造每个部族领土的祖先的遗物。大多数情况下，它们是磨平的木头或石头，上面刻有图腾的标志。同样的物品也可以体现出对这些土地的合法所有权。埃米尔·杜克海姆认为它们是神圣的典型：从普通世界中分离出来的东西，被赋予虔诚的敬意；实际上是 “氏族的圣舟”。⁶⁰

During periodic rites of initiation, new cohorts of male Aranda youths are taught about the history of the land and the nature of its resources. They are also charged with the responsibility of caring for it, which in particular means the duty to maintain churinga and the sacred sites associated with them, which only the initiated should properly know about in the first place. As observed by T. G. H. Strehlow – an anthropologist and the son of a Lutheran missionary, who spent many years among the Aranda in the early twentieth century, becoming the foremost non-Aranda authority on this topic – the weight of duty is conveyed through terror, torture and mutilation:

在定期举行的入会仪式上，新一批的阿兰达男性青年被教导有关土地的历史和资源的性质。他们还被赋予了照顾土地的责任，这尤其意味着有责任维护 churinga 和与之相关的圣地，而这些只有入门者才应该首先了解。正如 T·G·H·斯特雷洛 —— 人类学家和路德教会传教士的儿子，在二十世纪初在阿兰达人中呆了很多年，成为这个话题上最重要的非阿兰达人权威 —— 所观察到的那样，责任的重量是通过恐怖、酷刑和残害来传递的。

One or two months after the novice has submitted to circumcision, there follows the second principal initiation rite, that of sub-incision … The novice has now undergone all the requisite physical operations which have been designed to make him worthy of a man’s estate, and he has learned to obey the commands of the old men implicitly. His newly-found blind obedience stands in striking contrast to the unbridled insolence and general unruliness of temper which characterized his behaviour in the days of his childhood. Native children are usually spoiled by their parents. Mothers gratify every whim of their offspring, and fathers do not bother about any disciplinary measures. The deliberate cruelty with which the traditional initiation rites are carried out at a later age is carefully calculated to punish insolent and lawless boys for their past impudence and to train them into obedient, dutiful ‘citizens’ who will obey their elders without a murmur, and be fit heirs to the ancient sacred traditions of their clan.⁶¹

新生儿接受割礼一两个月后，接下来是第二个主要的入教仪式，即亚割礼…… 现在，新生儿已经经历了所有必要的身体操作，这些操作旨在使他配得上一个男人的身份，而且他已经学会隐蔽地服从老人的命令。他新发现的盲目服从与他童年时的行为特点 —— 肆无忌惮的傲慢和普遍的不羁形成了鲜明的对比。土生土长的孩子通常被他们的父母宠坏了。母亲满足其后代的每一个奇思妙想，而父亲则不屑于采取任何惩戒措施。传统的入教仪式在晚年进行，这种故意的残酷性是经过精心设计的，目的是为了惩罚无礼和无法无天的男孩过去的无礼行为，并把他们训练成顺从的、尽职的 “公民”，他们会毫无怨言地服从他们的长辈，并成为他们部族古老的神圣传统的合适继承人。⁶¹

Here is another, painfully clear example of how behaviour observed in ritual contexts takes exactly the opposite form to the free and equal relations that prevail in ordinary life. It is only within such contexts that exclusive (sacred) forms of property exist, strict and top-down hierarchies are enforced, and where orders given are dutifully obeyed.⁶²

这是另一个痛苦而清晰的例子，说明在仪式背景下观察到的行为与普通生活中普遍存在的自由和平等关系完全相反。只有在这样的背景下，才存在排他性的（神圣的）财产形式，严格的、自上而下的等级制度才得以实施，所下达的命令才会被尽职尽责地服从。⁶²

Looking back again to prehistory, it is – as we’ve already noted – impossible to know precisely which forms of property or ownership existed at places like Göbekli Tepe, Poverty Point, Sannai Maruyama or Stonehenge, any more than we can know if regalia buried with the ‘princes’ of the Upper Palaeolithic were their personal possessions. What we can now suggest, in light of these wider considerations, is that such carefully co-ordinated ritual theatres, often laid out with geometrical precision, were exactly the kinds of places where exclusive claims to rights over property – together with strict demands for unquestioning obedience – were likely to be made, among otherwise free people. If private property has an ‘origin’, it is as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself. The pertinent question to ask is not so much when this happened, as how it eventually came to order so many other aspects of human affairs.

IN WHICH WE FIRST CONSIDER THE QUESTION OF CULTURAL DIFFERENTIATION

其中，我们首先考虑的是文化分化的问题

The systematic nature of this rejection of agriculture is a fascinating phenomenon in itself. Most who attempt to explain it nowadays appeal almost entirely to environmental factors: relying on acorns or pine nuts as one’s staple in California, or aquatic resources further north, was simply ecologically more efficient than the maize agriculture adopted in other parts of North America. No doubt this was true on the whole, but in an area spanning several thousand miles and a wide variety of different ecosystems, it seems unlikely that there was not a single region where maize cultivation would have been advantageous. And if efficiency was the only consideration, one would have to imagine there were some cultigens – beans, squash, pumpkins, watermelons, any one of an endless variety of leafy vegetables – that someone, somewhere along the coast might have found worth adopting.

这种对农业的拒绝的系统性本身就是一个迷人的现象。如今，大多数试图解释这一现象的人，他们几乎完全诉诸于环境因素：在加利福尼亚依靠橡子或松子作为主食，或在更北的地方依靠水生资源，在生态上比在北美其他地方采用的玉米农业更有效。毫无疑问，这在总体上是正确的，但在一个横跨数千英里和各种不同生态系统的地区，似乎不可能没有一个地区的玉米种植是有利的。如果效率是唯一的考虑因素，人们不得不想象有一些栽培品种 —— 豆子、南瓜、南瓜、西瓜、任何一种无穷无尽的多叶蔬菜 —— 某人，在沿海某地可能发现值得采用。

The systematic rejection of all domesticated foodstuffs is even more striking when one realizes that many Californians and Northwest Coast peoples did plant and grow tobacco, as well as other plants – such as springbank clover and Pacific silverweed – which they used for ritual purposes, or as luxuries consumed only at special feasts.³ In other words, they were perfectly familiar with the techniques for planting and tending to cultigens. Yet they comprehensively rejected the idea of planting everyday foodstuffs or treating crops as staples.

当人们意识到许多加利福尼亚人和西北海岸人确实种植了烟草以及其他植物 —— 如春岸三叶草和太平洋银草 —— 他们将其用于仪式，或作为奢侈品只在特别的宴会上消费时，这种对所有驯化食品的系统性拒绝就更加引人注目了。³换句话说，他们完全熟悉种植和照料崇拜物的技术。然而，他们全面拒绝了种植日常食品或将农作物作为主食的想法。

One reason this rejection is significant is that it offers a clue as to how one might answer the much broader question we posed – but then left dangling – at the beginning of Chapter Four: what is it that causes human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbours? Recall how, after the end of the last Ice Age, the archaeological record is increasingly characterized by ‘culture areas’: that is, localized populations with their own characteristic styles of clothing, cooking and architecture; and no doubt also their own stories about the origin of the universe, rules for the marriage of cousins, and so forth. Ever since Mesolithic times, the broad tendency has been for human beings to further subdivide, coming up with endless new ways to distinguish themselves from their neighbours.

这种拒绝具有重要意义的一个原因是，它提供了一条线索，让我们可以回答我们在第四章开始时提出的更广泛的问题 —— 但后来又悬而未决：是什么导致人类花费如此多的精力来证明他们与邻居的不同？回顾一下，在上个冰河时代结束后，考古记录中越来越多地出现了 “文化区” 的特征：也就是说，局部的人口有他们自己特有的服装、烹饪和建筑风格；毫无疑问，还有他们自己关于宇宙起源的故事、表亲结婚的规则，等等。自中石器时代以来，人类的大趋势是进一步细分，想出无穷无尽的新方法来将自己与邻居区分开来。

It is curious how little anthropologists speculate about why this whole process of subdivision ever happened. It’s usually treated as self-evident, an inescapable fact of human existence. If any explanation is offered, it’s assumed to be an effect of language. Tribes or nations are regularly referred to as ‘ethno-linguistic’ groups; that is, what is really important about them is the fact they share the same language. Those who share the same language are presumed, all other things being equal, also to share the same customs, sensibilities and traditions of family life. Languages, in turn, are generally assumed to branch off from one another by something like a natural process.

奇怪的是，人类学家很少推测为什么这整个细分过程曾经发生。它通常被视为不言而喻的，是人类生存的一个不可避免的事实。如果提供任何解释，它被认为是语言的影响。部落或国家经常被称为 “民族语言” 群体；也就是说，他们真正重要的是他们拥有相同的语言。在所有其他条件相同的情况下，那些拥有相同语言的人被认为也拥有相同的习俗、情感和家庭生活传统。反过来，语言一般被认为是通过类似于自然过程的方式从彼此中分支出来的。

In this line of reasoning, a key breakthrough was the realization – usually attributed to Sir William Jones, a British colonial official stationed in Bengal towards the end of the eighteenth century – that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit all seem to derive from a common root. Before long, linguists had determined that Celtic, Germanic and Slavic languages – as well as Persian, Armenian, Kurdish and more – all belonged to the same ‘Indo-European’ family. Others, for instance Semitic, Turkic and East Asian languages, did not. Studying relationships among these various linguistic groups eventually led to the science of glottochronology: how distinct languages diverge from a common source. Since all languages are continually changing, and since that change appears to occur at a relatively steady pace, it became possible to reconstruct how and when Turkic languages began to separate from Mongolic, or the relative temporal distance between Spanish and French, Finnish and Estonian, Hawaiian and Malagasy, and so on. All this led to the construction of a series of linguistic family trees, and eventually an attempt – still highly controversial – to trace virtually all Eurasian languages to a single hypothetical ancestor called ‘Nostratic’. Nostratic was believed to have existed sometime during the later Palaeolithic, or even to have been the original phylum from which every human language sprang.

在这一推理过程中，一个关键的突破是意识到 —— 通常归功于 18 世纪末驻扎在孟加拉的英国殖民官员威廉·琼斯爵士 —— 希腊语、拉丁语和梵语似乎都来自一个共同的根源。不久之后，语言学家确定凯尔特语、日耳曼语和斯拉夫语 —— 以及波斯语、亚美尼亚语、库尔德语等等 —— 都属于同一个 “印欧语系”。其他语言，例如闪米特语、突厥语和东亚语言，则不是。研究这些不同的语言群体之间的关系最终导致了格罗托克学的诞生：不同的语言是如何从一个共同的源头分化出来的。由于所有语言都在不断变化，而且这种变化似乎是以相对稳定的速度发生的，因此有可能重建突厥语如何以及何时开始从蒙古语中分离出来，或者重建西班牙语和法语、芬兰语和爱沙尼亚语、夏威夷语和马达加斯加语之间的相对时间距离，等等。所有这些导致了一系列语言家族树的构建，并最终试图将几乎所有的欧亚语言都追溯到一个被称为 “Nostratic” 的假想祖先 —— 至今仍有很大争议。Nostratic 被认为存在于旧石器时代晚期的某个时候，甚至被认为是所有人类语言产生的原始系统。

It might seem strange to imagine linguistic drift causing a single idiom to evolve into languages as different as English, Chinese and Apache; but, given the extraordinarily long periods of time being considered here, even an accretion of tiny generational changes can, it seems, eventually transform the vocabulary and sound-structure, even the grammar of a language completely.

想象一下语言漂移导致一个成语演变为英语、汉语和阿帕奇语这样不同的语言似乎很奇怪；但是，鉴于这里考虑的时间特别长，即使是微小的代际变化的累积，似乎最终也能完全改变一种语言的词汇和声音结构，甚至语法。

If cultural differences largely correspond to what happens in language, then distinct human cultures, more generally, would have to be the product of a similar process of gradual drift. As populations migrated or became otherwise isolated from one another, they formed not only their own characteristic languages but their own traditional customs as well. All this involves any number of largely unexamined assumptions – for instance, why is it that languages are always changing to begin with? – but the main point is this. Even if we take such an explanation as a given, it doesn’t really explain what we actually observe on the ground.

如果文化差异在很大程度上与语言发生的情况相符，那么不同的人类文化，更广泛地说，将不得不是类似的逐渐漂移过程的产物。随着人口迁移或彼此隔离，他们不仅形成了自己的特色语言，还形成了自己的传统习俗。所有这一切都涉及任何数量的基本上未经审查的假设 —— 例如，为什么语言一开始就总是在变化？- 但主要的一点是这样的。即使我们把这样的解释作为一个既定事实，它也不能真正解释我们在实地观察到的情况。

Consider an ethno-linguistic map of northern California in the early twentieth century, set into a larger map of North American ‘culture areas’ as defined by ethnologists at that time:

考虑一下二十世纪初加利福尼亚北部的民族语言地图，它被镶嵌在当时民族学家所定义的北美 “文化区” 的大地图中。

What we are presented with here is a collection of people with broadly similar cultural practices, but speaking a jumble of languages, many drawn from entirely different language families – as distant from one another as, say, Arabic, Tamil and Portuguese. All these groups shared broad similarities: in terms of how they went about gathering and processing foodstuffs; in their most important religious rituals; in the organization of their political life, and so on. But there were also subtle or not-so-subtle differences between them, so that members of each group saw themselves as distinct kinds of people: Yurok, Hupa, Karok and so forth.

我们在这里看到的是一群具有大体相似的文化习俗的人，但却说着杂乱无章的语言，其中许多人来自完全不同的语系 —— 就像阿拉伯语、泰米尔语和葡萄牙语一样彼此相距遥远。所有这些群体都有广泛的相似之处：在他们如何采集和加工食品方面；在他们最重要的宗教仪式方面；在他们政治生活的组织方面，等等。但他们之间也有微妙的或不那么微妙的区别，因此，每个群体的成员都把自己看作是不同类型的人。尤罗克人、胡帕人、卡洛克人等等。

These local identities did map on to linguistic differences. However, neighbouring peoples speaking languages drawn from different families (Athabascan, Na-Dene, Uto-Aztecan and so on) actually had far more in common with each other, in almost every other way, than they did with speakers of languages from the same linguistic family living in other parts of North America. The same can be said of the First Nations of the Canadian Northwest Coast, who also speak a variety of unrelated languages, but in other ways resemble one another far more closely than they do speakers of the same languages from outside the Northwest Coast, including in California.

这些地方特征确实映射到了语言差异上。然而，讲不同语系语言（阿萨巴斯坎语、纳·迪内语、乌托·阿兹特克语等）的相邻民族，在几乎所有其他方面的共同点，都远远多于他们与生活在北美其他地区的同一语系的语言使用者之间的共同点。加拿大西北海岸的原住民也是如此，他们也讲各种不相关的语言，但在其他方面的相似度远远高于西北海岸以外的相同语言使用者，包括在加利福尼亚。

Of course, European colonization had a profound and catastrophic impact on the distribution of Native American peoples, but what we are seeing here also reflects a deeper continuity of culture-historical development, a process that tended to occur at various points in human history, when modern nation states were not around to order populations into neat ethno-linguistic groups. Arguably, the very idea that the world is divided into such homogeneous units, each with its own history, is largely a product of the modern nation state, and the desire of each to claim for itself a deep territorial lineage. At the very least, we should think twice before projecting such uniformities back in time, on to remote periods of human history for which no direct evidence of language distributions even exists.

当然，欧洲殖民化对美洲原住民的分布产生了深刻的、灾难性的影响，但我们在这里看到的也反映了文化·历史发展的更深层次的连续性，这个过程往往发生在人类历史的不同时期，当时现代民族国家还不在身边，无法将人口整理成整齐的种族·语言群体。可以说，世界被划分为这种同质的单位，每个单位都有自己的历史，这种想法在很大程度上是现代民族国家的产物，以及每个国家为自己宣称有深厚的领土血统的。至少，在把这种统一性投射到人类历史的遥远时期之前，我们应该三思而后行，因为这些时期甚至不存在关于语言分布的直接证据。

In this chapter, we want to explore what actually did drive processes of cultural subdivision for the greater part of human history. Such processes are crucial to understanding how human freedoms, once taken for granted, eventually came to be lost. In doing this, we’ll focus on the history of those non-agricultural peoples who inhabited the western coast of North America. As their refusal of agriculture implies, these processes were likely far more self-conscious than scholars usually imagine. In some cases, as we’ll see, they appear to have involved explicit reflection and argument about the nature of freedom itself.

在本章中，我们想探讨在人类历史的大部分时间里，究竟是什么推动了文化细分的进程。这种过程对于理解曾经被视为理所当然的人类自由是如何最终丧失的至关重要。在此过程中，我们将关注那些居住在北美西海岸的非农业民族的历史。正如他们对农业的拒绝所暗示的那样，这些过程可能比学者们通常想象的要自觉得多。在某些情况下，正如我们所看到的，他们似乎对自由的性质本身进行了明确的思考和争论。

WHERE WE CONSIDER THE WILDLY INADEQUATE, SOMETIMES OFFENSIVE BUT OCCASIONALLY SUGGESTIVE WAYS IN WHICH THE QUESTION OF ‘CULTURE AREAS’ HAS BEEN BROACHED BEFORE

在这里，我们考虑了以前讨论 “文化领域” 问题的那些不充分的、有时是冒犯性的、但偶尔是暗示性的方式。

How did earlier generations of scholars describe these regional clusters of societies? The term most commonly used, up until the middle of the twentieth century, was ‘culture areas’ (or ‘culture circles’), a concept which, nowadays, has either been forgotten or fallen into disrepute.

前几代学者是如何描述这些区域性的社会集群的？直到二十世纪中叶，最常用的术语是 “文化区”（或 “文化圈”），如今这个概念要么被遗忘，要么变得不伦不类。

The notion of ‘culture areas’ first emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. Since the Renaissance, human history had been seen largely as the story of great migrations: humans, having fallen from grace, wandering ever more distant from the Garden of Eden. Family trees showing the dispersal of Indo-European or Semitic languages did nothing to discourage this kind of thinking. But the notion of human progress pulled in the exact opposite direction: it encouraged researchers to imagine ‘primitive’ peoples as tiny, isolated communities, cut off from each other and the larger world. This, of course, is what made it possible to treat them as specimens of earlier stages of human development in the first place: if everyone were in regular contact with each other, this sort of evolutionist analysis wouldn’t really work.⁴

“文化区” 的概念最早出现在 19 世纪的最后几十年和 20 世纪的最初阶段。自文艺复兴以来，人类历史在很大程度上被看作是大迁徙的故事：人类在堕落之后，在离伊甸园越来越远的地方徘徊。显示印欧语系或闪族语言散布情况的家谱并没有阻止这种想法的产生。但是，人类进步的概念却恰恰相反：它鼓励研究人员将 “原始” 民族想象成微小的、孤立的社区，与彼此和大世界隔绝。当然，这正是将他们作为人类发展早期阶段的标本的原因：如果每个人都经常相互接触，这种进化论的分析就不会真正起作用。⁴

The notion of ‘culture areas’, by contrast, came largely out of museums, and particularly in North America. Curators organizing art and artefacts had to decide whether to arrange their material so as to illustrate theories about the different stages of human adaptation (Lower Savagery, Upper Savagery, Lower Barbarism and so on); or so as to trace the history of ancient migrations, whether real or imagined (in the American context this would mean organizing them by language family, then assumed, for no particularly good reason, to correspond with ‘racial’ stocks); or whether to simply organize them into regional clusters.⁵ Though the last of these seemed most arbitrary, it proved to be the one that really worked best. Art and technology from different Eastern Woodlands tribes, for instance, appeared to have much more in common than material from, say, all speakers of Athabascan languages; or all people who relied mainly on fishing, or cultivated maize. This method turned out to work quite well for archaeological material too, with prehistorians like the Australian V. Gordon Childe observing similar patterns among Neolithic villages stretching across central Europe, forming regional clusters of evidence relating to domestic life, art and ritual.

相比之下，“文化区” 的概念主要来自于博物馆，特别是在北美。馆长们在整理艺术品和工艺品时，必须决定是安排他们的材料以说明人类适应的不同阶段的理论（下野蛮时代、上未开化时代、下未开化时代等等）；还是追溯古代移民的历史，无论是真实的还是想象的（在美洲的背景下，这意味着按语言家族组织它们，然后没有特别好的理由，假定与 “种族” 种群相对应）；或者是否只是将它们组织成区域群组。⁵尽管最后一种方法似乎是最随意的，但它被证明是真正最有效的一种方法。例如，来自不同的东部林地部落的艺术和技术，似乎比来自所有讲阿萨巴斯坎语的人，或者所有主要依靠捕鱼或种植玉米的人的材料有更多的共同点。这种方法对考古材料也很有效，像澳大利亚的 V·戈登·奇尔德这样的史前学家在横跨欧洲中部的新石器时代村庄中观察到了类似的模式，形成了与家庭生活、艺术和仪式有关的区域证据集群。

At first, the most prominent exponent of the culture area approach was Franz Boas. Boas, it will be recalled, was a transplanted German ethnologist⁶ who in 1899 landed a chair in anthropology at New York’s Columbia University. He also gained a position in charge of ethnographic collections at the American Museum of Natural History, where his halls dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and Northwest Coast still remain popular attractions over a century later. Boas’s student and successor at the museum, Clark Wissler, tried to systematize his ideas by dividing the Americas as a whole, from Newfoundland to Tierra del Fuego, into fifteen different regional systems, each with its own characteristic customs, aesthetic styles, ways of obtaining and preparing food, and forms of social organization. Before long, other ethnologists were undertaking similar projects, mapping out regions from Europe to Oceania.

起初，文化区方法最突出的支持者是弗朗兹·博厄斯。我们可以回顾一下，博厄斯是一位移居国外的德国民族学家。⁶1899 年，他在纽约的哥伦比亚大学担任人类学教授。他还在美洲自然历史博物馆获得了一个负责民族学收藏的职位，在那里，他专门为东部林地和西北海岸设计的大厅在一个多世纪后仍然是受欢迎的景点。博厄斯的学生和博物馆的继任者克拉克·维斯勒试图将他的想法系统化，将美洲作为一个整体，从纽芬兰到火地岛，分为 15 个不同的区域系统，每个系统都有自己的特色习俗、审美风格、获取和准备食物的方式，以及社会组织形式。不久之后，其他民族学家也开展了类似的项目，绘制了从欧洲到大洋洲的区域图。

Boas was a staunch anti-racist. As a German Jew, he was particularly troubled by the way the American obsession with race and eugenics was being taken up in his own mother country.⁷ When Wissler began to embrace certain eugenicist ideas, the pair had a bitter falling-out. But the original impetus for the culture area concept was precisely to find a way of talking about human history which avoided ranking populations into higher or lower on any grounds, whether claiming some were of superior genetic stock or had reached a more advanced level of moral and technological evolution. Instead, Boas and his students proposed that anthropologists reconstruct the diffusion of what were then referred to as ‘culture traits’ (ceramics, sweat lodges, the organization of young men into competing warrior societies), and try to understand why, as Wissler put it, tribes of a certain region came to share ‘the same mesh of culture traits’.⁸

博厄斯是一个坚定的反种族主义者。作为一个德国犹太人，他对美洲人对种族和优生学的迷恋在他自己的祖国被接受的方式感到特别不安。⁷当维斯勒开始接受某些优生学思想时，他们两人发生了激烈的争吵。但是，文化区概念的最初动力正是为了找到一种谈论人类历史的方式，避免以任何理由对人口进行高低排序，不管是声称某些人的遗传基因优越还是达到了更先进的道德和技术进化水平。相反，博厄斯和他的学生建议人类学家重建当时被称为 “文化特征”（陶瓷、汗蒸房、将年轻人组织成竞争性的战士社会）的传播，并试图理解为什么，正如维斯勒所说，某个地区的部落会共享 “相同的文化特征网”。⁸

This resulted in a peculiar fascination with reconstructing the historical movement, or ‘diffusion’, of specific customs and ideas. Flipping through anthropological journals from the turn of the twentieth century, you find that the majority of the essays in a given number are of this type. They paid special attention to contemporary games and musical instruments used, say, in various different parts of Africa, or of Oceania – perhaps because, of all culture traits, these seemed least affected by practical considerations or constraints, and their distribution might therefore shed light on historical patterns of contact and influence. One especially lively area of debate concerned the string-figure game known as cat’s cradles. During the Torres Straits expedition of 1898, Professors Alfred Haddon and W. H. R. Rivers, then leading figures in British anthropology, developed a uniform method of diagramming string figures used in children’s play, which made it possible for systematic comparisons to be made. Before long, rival theories concerning the origins and diffusion of particular patterns of string figures (the Palm Tree, the Bagobo Diamond…) among different societies were being hotly contested in the pages of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society and similar erudite venues.⁹

这导致了对重建特定习俗和思想的历史运动，或 “扩散” 的奇特迷恋。翻开二十世纪之交的人类学杂志，你会发现某个数字中的大部分文章都是这种类型的。他们特别关注当代的游戏和乐器，例如在非洲或大洋洲的不同地区使用的游戏和乐器 —— 也许是因为在所有的文化特征中，这些似乎受实际考虑或限制的影响最小，因此它们的分布可能揭示了接触和影响的历史模式。一个特别活跃的辩论领域涉及到被称为 “猫咪摇篮” 的弦乐游戏。在 1898 年托雷斯海峡考察期间，当时英国人类学界的领军人物阿尔弗雷德·哈登教授和 W·H.R·里弗斯教授开发了一种统一的方法，将儿童游戏中使用的绳索图示化，这使得系统的比较成为可能。不久之后，关于不同社会中特定弦乐图（棕榈树、Bagobo 钻石…… ）的起源和传播的对立理论在《皇家人类学会杂志》和类似的博学场所进行了激烈的争论。⁹

The obvious questions, then, were: why culture traits cluster as they do; and how they come to be ‘enmeshed’ in regional patterns to begin with. Boas himself was convinced that while geography might have defined the circulation of ideas within particular regions (mountains and deserts forming natural barriers), what happened inside those regions was, effectively, down to historical accident. Others hypothesized about the predominating ethos or form of organization within a given region; or dreamed of creating a kind of natural science that might one day explain or even predict the ebb and flow of styles, habits and social forms. Almost no one reads this literature any more. Like the cat’s cradles, today it’s considered at best an amusing token of the discipline’s childhood.

那么，显而易见的问题是：为什么文化特征会像它们那样聚集在一起；以及它们是如何开始 “被卷入” 区域模式的。 博厄斯本人确信，虽然地理环境可能界定了特定区域内的思想流通（山脉和沙漠形成了自然屏障），但这些区域内发生的事情实际上是历史的偶然。另一些人则假设了一个特定区域内占主导地位的精神或组织形式；或者梦想创造一种自然科学，有朝一日可以解释或甚至预测风格、习惯和社会形式的起伏。现在几乎没有人再读这种文献了。就像猫的摇篮一样，今天它最多被认为是这门学科的童年的一个有趣的象征。

Still, important issues were raised here: issues which no one to this day has really been able to address. For example, why are the peoples of California so similar to one another, and so different from neighbouring peoples of the American Southwest, or the Canadian Northwest Coast? Perhaps the most insightful contribution came from Marcel Mauss, who tackled the notion of ‘culture areas’ in a series of essays on nationalism and civilization written between 1910 and 1930.¹⁰ Mauss thought the idea of cultural ‘diffusion’ was mostly nonsense; not for the reasons most anthropologists do now (that it’s pointless and uninteresting),¹¹ but because he felt it was based on a false assumption: that the movement of people, technologies and ideas was somehow unusual.

不过，这里还是提出了重要的问题：至今没有人能够真正解决这些问题。例如，为什么加利福尼亚的人民彼此之间如此相似，而与美洲西南部或加拿大西北海岸的邻国人民如此不同？也许最有洞察力的贡献来自于马塞尔·莫斯，他在 1910 年至 1930 年间写的一系列关于民族主义和文明的文章中解决了 “文化区” 的概念。¹⁰莫斯认为文化 “扩散” 的想法大多是无稽之谈；并不是像现在大多数人类学家那样（认为它毫无意义和无趣）。¹¹而是因为他觉得它建立在一个错误的假设之上：人、技术和思想的流动在某种程度上是不寻常的。

The exact opposite was true, Mauss argued. People in past times, he wrote, appear to have travelled a great deal – more than they do today – and it’s simply impossible to imagine that anyone back then would have been unaware of the existence of basketry, feather pillows, or the wheel if such objects were regularly employed a month or two’s journey away; the same could presumably be said of ancestor cults or syncopated drum rhythms. Mauss went further. He was convinced the entire Pacific Rim had once been a single realm of cultural exchange, with voyagers criss-crossing it at regular intervals. He too was interested in the distribution of games across the entire region. Once, he taught a college course called ‘On the greasy pole, the ball play, and other games on the periphery of the Pacific Ocean’, his premise being that, at least when it came to games, all lands bordering the Pacific – from Japan to New Zealand to California – could be treated, effectively, as a single culture area.¹² Legend has it that when Mauss, visiting New York’s American Museum of Natural History, was shown the famous Kwakiutl war canoe in Boas’s Northwest Coast wing, his first reaction was to say that now he knew precisely what ancient China must have looked like.

莫斯认为，事实恰恰相反。他写道，过去的人们似乎经常旅行 —— 比今天更多 —— 而且根本不可能想象当时的人不知道篮子、羽毛枕头或轮子的存在，如果这些东西经常在一两个月的旅程中被使用的话；祖先崇拜或切分音鼓的节奏大概也是如此。莫斯走得更远。他相信整个环太平洋地区曾经是一个单一的文化交流领域，航行者定期在这里交错往来。他也对整个地区的游戏分布感兴趣。有一次，他在大学里讲授了一门名为 “在油腻的杆子上玩球，以及太平洋周边的其他游戏” 的课程，他的前提是，至少在游戏方面，所有与太平洋接壤的土地 —— 从日本到新西兰到加利福尼亚 —— 都可以有效地被视为一个单一的文化区域。¹²传说中，当莫斯访问纽约的美洲自然历史博物馆时，在博厄斯的西北海岸翼展示了著名的 Kwakiutl 战舟，他的第一反应是说，现在他确切地知道古代中国一定是什么样子的。

Though Mauss overstated his case, his exaggeration nonetheless led him to reframe the entire question of ‘culture areas’ in an intriguing way.¹³ For if everyone was broadly aware of what surrounding people were up to, and if knowledge of foreign customs, arts and technologies was widespread, or at least easily available, then the question becomes not why certain culture traits spread, but why other culture traits didn’t. The answer, Mauss felt, is that this is precisely how cultures define themselves against their neighbours. Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal. Chinese are people who use chopsticks, but not knives and forks; Thai are people who use spoons, but not chopsticks, and so forth. It’s easy enough to see how this could be true of aesthetics – styles of art, music or table manners – but surprisingly, Mauss found, it extended even to technologies which held obvious adaptive or utilitarian benefits. He was intrigued, for example, by the fact that Athabascans in Alaska steadfastly refused to adopt Inuit kayaks, despite these being self-evidently more suited to the environment than their own boats. Inuit, for their part, refused to adopt Athabascan snowshoes.

尽管莫斯夸大了他的情况，但他的夸张还是使他以一种有趣的方式重新构建了 “文化区” 的整个问题。¹³因为如果每个人都广泛了解周围的人在做什么，如果对外国习俗、艺术和技术的了解很普遍，或者至少很容易得到，那么问题就不是为什么某些文化特征会传播，而是为什么其他文化特征没有传播。莫斯认为，答案是，这正是文化对其邻国的自我定义。文化实际上是拒绝的结构。中国人使用筷子，但不使用刀和叉；泰国人使用勺子，但不使用筷子，等等。很容易看出这可能是美学的真实情况 —— 艺术风格、音乐或餐桌礼仪 —— 但令人惊讶的是，莫斯发现，它甚至延伸到具有明显适应性或功利性的技术上。例如，他对阿拉斯加的阿萨巴斯克人坚定地拒绝采用因纽特人的皮艇这一事实感到好奇，尽管这些皮艇不言而喻地比他们自己的船更适合于环境。因纽特人则拒绝采用阿萨巴斯克人的雪鞋。

What was true of particular cultures was equally true of culture areas; or, as Mauss preferred, ‘civilizations’. Since almost any existing style, form or technique has always been potentially available to almost anyone, these too must always have come about through some such combination of borrowing and refusal. Crucially, Mauss noted, this process tends to be quite self-conscious. He especially liked to evoke the example of debates in Chinese courts about the adoption of foreign styles and customs, such as the remarkable argument put forward by a king of the Zhou Dynasty to his advisors and great feudal vassals, who were refusing to wear the Hunnish (Manchu) dress and to ride horses instead of driving chariots: he painstakingly tried to show them the difference between rites and customs, between the arts and fashion. ‘Societies’, wrote Mauss, ‘live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.’¹⁴

特定文化的真实情况同样适用于文化领域；或者，正如莫斯所喜欢的，“文明”。由于几乎任何现存的风格、形式或技术都有可能为任何人所用，所以这些也一定是通过某种借用和拒绝的组合而产生的。重要的是，莫斯指出，这个过程往往是相当自觉的。他特别喜欢引用中国宫廷中关于采用外国风格和习俗的辩论的例子，例如周朝的一位国王对他的顾问和大封建臣子提出的非凡论点，他们拒绝穿匈奴（满族）的衣服，拒绝骑马而不是驾驶战车：他煞费苦心地试图向他们展示礼仪和习俗、艺术和时尚之间的区别。“社会”，莫斯写道，“通过相互借鉴而生存，但他们对自己的定义是拒绝借鉴而不是接受借鉴。”¹⁴

Nor are such reflections limited to what historians think of as ‘high’ (that is, literate) civilizations. Inuit did not simply react with instinctual revulsion when they first encountered someone wearing snowshoes, and then refused to change their minds. They reflected on what adopting, or not adopting, snowshoes might say about the kind of people they considered themselves to be. In fact, Mauss concluded, it is precisely in comparing themselves with their neighbours that people come to think of themselves as distinct groups.

这种反思也不限于历史学家认为的 “高等”（也就是有文化的）文明。当因纽特人第一次遇到穿雪鞋的人时，他们并不只是本能的反感，然后拒绝改变主意。他们反思了采用或不采用雪鞋可能说明他们认为自己是什么样的人。事实上，莫斯总结说，正是在将自己与邻居进行比较时，人们才会认为自己是一个独特的群体。

Framed in this way, the question of how ‘culture areas’ formed is necessarily a political one. It raises the possibility that decisions such as whether or not to adopt agriculture weren’t just calculations of caloric advantage or matters of random cultural taste, but also reflected questions about values, about what humans really are (and consider themselves to be), and how they should properly relate to one another. Just the kinds of issues, in fact, which our own post-Enlightenment intellectual tradition tends to express through terms like freedom, responsibility, authority, equality, solidarity and justice.

以此为框架，“文化区” 如何形成的问题必然是一个政治问题。它提出了这样一种可能性：诸如是否采用农业的决定不仅仅是热量优势的计算或随机的文化品味问题，而且还反映了关于价值观的问题，关于人类到底是什么（以及认为自己是什么），以及他们应该如何适当地相互联系。事实上，这些问题正是我们自己的后启蒙思想传统倾向于通过自由、责任、权威、平等、团结和正义等术语来表达的。

IN WHICH WE APPLY MAUSS’S INSIGHT TO THE PACIFIC COAST AND CONSIDER WHY WALTER GOLDSCHMIDT’S DESCRIPTION OF ABORIGINAL CALIFORNIANS AS ‘PROTESTANT FORAGERS’, WHILE IN MANY WAYS ABSURD, STILL HAS SOMETHING TO TELL US

在其中，我们将毛斯的洞察力应用于太平洋沿岸，并考虑为什么沃尔特·戈德施密特将加利福尼亚原住民描述为 “新教的觅食者”，虽然在许多方面是荒谬的，但仍有一些东西要告诉我们。

Let us return, then, to the Pacific. Since around the start of the twentieth century, anthropologists have divided the indigenous inhabitants of North America’s western littoral into two broad culture areas: ‘California’ and the ‘Northwest Coast’. Before the nineteenth century, when the effects of the fur trade and then the Gold Rush wreaked havoc on indigenous groups and many were exterminated, these populations formed a continuous chain of foraging societies extending through much of the West Coast: at that time, perhaps the largest continuous distribution of foraging peoples in the world. If nothing else, it was a highly efficient way of life; both the Northwest Coast peoples and those of California maintained higher densities of population than, say, maize, beans and squash farmers of the nearby Great Basin and American Southwest.

那么，让我们回到太平洋地区。大约从二十世纪初开始，人类学家就把北美西部沿海地区的原住民分为两大文化区。“加州” 和 “西北海岸”。在十九世纪之前，毛皮贸易和淘金热的影响对原住民群体造成了严重的破坏，许多人被灭绝，这些人口形成了一个连续的觅食社会链，延伸到西海岸的大部分地区：在当时，也许是世界上最大的连续觅食民族分布。如果不出意外，这是一种高效的生活方式；西北海岸的，以及加利福尼亚的人民都保持着较高的人口密度，比起附近大盆地和美洲西南部的玉米、豆类和南瓜农民来说。

In other ways, the northern and southern zones were profoundly different, both ecologically and culturally. The peoples of the Canadian Northwest Coast relied heavily on fishing, and particularly the harvesting of anadromous fish such as salmon and eulachon, which migrate upriver from the sea to spawn; as well as a variety of marine mammals, terrestrial plants and game resources. As we saw a couple of chapters ago, these groups divided their year between very large coastal winter villages, holding ceremonies of great complexity, and, in spring and summer, smaller social units that were more pragmatically focused on the provision of food. Expert woodworkers, they also transformed the local conifers (fir, spruce, redwood, yew and cedar) into a dazzling material culture of carved and painted masks, containers, tribal crests, totem poles, richly decorated houses and canoes which ranks among the world’s most striking artistic traditions.

在其他方面，北部和南部地区在生态和文化上都有深刻的不同。加拿大西北海岸的人民严重依赖捕鱼，特别是收获溯河而上的鱼类，如鲑鱼和银鱼，它们从海里迁移到上游产卵；以及各种海洋哺乳动物、陆生植物和游戏资源。正如我们在前几章所看到的，这些群体将他们的一年划分为非常大的沿海冬季村庄，举行非常复杂的仪式，而在春季和夏季，较小的社会单位更务实地专注于提供食物。作为木工专家，他们还将当地的针叶树（冷杉、云杉、红木、紫杉和雪松）改造成令人眼花缭乱的物质文化，包括雕刻和绘画的面具、容器、部落徽章、图腾柱、装饰丰富的房屋和独木舟，这些都是世界上最引人注目的艺术传统之一。

Aboriginal societies in California, to the south, occupied one of the world’s most diverse habitats. They made use of a staggering variety of terrestrial resources, which they managed by careful techniques of burning, clearing and pruning. The region’s ‘Mediterranean’ climate and tightly compressed topography of mountains, deserts, foothills, river valleys and coastlines made for a rich assortment of local flora and fauna, exchanged at inter-tribal trade fairs. Most Californians were proficient fishers and hunters, but many also followed an ancient reliance on tree crops – especially nuts and acorns – as staple foods. Their artistic traditions differed from those of the Northwest Coast. House exteriors were generally plain and simple. There was almost nothing similar to the Northwest Coast masks or monumental sculptures that so delight museum curators; rather, aesthetic activity focused on the weaving of highly patterned baskets used for storing and serving food.¹⁵

南方加利福尼亚的原住民社会占据了世界上最多样化的栖息地之一。他们利用了种类繁多的陆地资源，并通过精心的燃烧、清理和修剪技术来管理这些资源。该地区的 “地中海” 气候和由山脉、沙漠、山麓、河谷和海岸线组成的紧凑的地形使当地的动植物种类丰富，在部落间的交易会上进行交换。大多数加利福尼亚人都是熟练的渔民和猎人，但许多人也遵循古代对树木作物的依赖 —— 特别是坚果和橡子 —— 作为主食。他们的艺术传统与西北海岸的人不同。房屋的外观一般都很朴素和简单。几乎没有类似于西北海岸的面具或纪念碑式的雕塑，这让博物馆馆长很高兴；相反，审美活动集中在编织用于储存和供应食物的高图案的篮子上。¹⁵

There was a further important difference between these two extensive groupings of societies, one that for some reason is far less remarked on by scholars today. From the Klamath River northwards, there existed societies dominated by warrior aristocracies engaged in frequent inter-group raiding and in which, traditionally, a significant portion of the population had consisted of chattel slaves. This apparently had been true as long as anyone living there could remember. But none of this was the case further south. How exactly did this happen? How did a boundary emerge between one extended ‘family’ of foraging societies that habitually raided each other for slaves, and another that did not keep slaves at all?

在这两个广泛的社会群体之间还有一个重要的区别，由于某种原因，今天的学者们很少注意到这个问题。从克拉玛斯河往北，存在着由战士贵族主导的社会，从事，经常进行群体间的突袭，在这些社会中，传统上有很大一部分人口是动产奴隶。显然，只要生活在那里的人能够记得，这就是事实。但在更远的南方，情况就不是这样了。这到底是怎么发生的？在一个习惯性地相互袭击奴隶的觅食社会 “大家庭” 和另一个根本不保留奴隶的社会之间，是如何出现界限的？

You might think there would be a lively debate about this among scholars, but in fact there isn’t. Instead, most treat the differences as insignificant, preferring to lump all Californian and Northwest Coast societies together in a single category of ‘affluent foragers’ or ‘complex hunter-gatherers’.¹⁶ If differences between them are considered at all, they are usually understood as mechanical responses to their contrasting modes of subsistence: aquatic (fish-based) economies, it’s argued, simply tended to foster warlike societies, just as terrestrial (acorn-based) foraging economies somehow did not.¹⁷ We will shortly consider the merits and limitations of such recent arguments, but first it is useful to turn back to some of the ethnographic work undertaken by earlier generations.

你可能认为学者们会就此展开热烈的辩论，但事实上并没有。相反，大多数人将这些差异视为无足轻重，宁愿将所有加利福尼亚和西北海岸的社会归为 “富裕的觅食者” 或 “复杂的狩猎采集者” 这一类。¹⁶如果考虑到它们之间的差异，它们通常被理解为对它们截然不同的生存方式的机械反应：人们认为，水生（以鱼为基础的）经济只是倾向于培养好战的社会，就像陆生（以橡子为基础的）觅食经济不知为何没有。¹⁷我们很快就会考虑这些最新论点的优点和局限性，但首先应该回头看看前几代人进行的一些民族学工作。

Some of the most striking research about the indigenous peoples of California was done by the twentieth-century anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt. One of his key writings, unobtrusively entitled ‘an ethnological contribution to the sociology of knowledge’, was concerned with the Yurok and other related groups who inhabited the northwestern corner of California, just south of the mountain ranges where Oregon begins.¹⁸ For Goldschmidt and members of his anthropological circle, the Yurok were famous for the central role that money – which took the form of white dentalium shells arranged on strings, and headbands made of bright red woodpecker scalps – played in every aspect of their social lives.

关于加州原住民的一些最引人注目的研究是由二十世纪人类学家沃尔特·戈德施密特完成的。他的主要著作之一，不引人注意地题为 “对知识社会学的民族学贡献”，涉及居住在加利福尼亚西北角的尤罗克人和其他相关群体，就在俄勒冈州开始的山脉以南。¹⁸对戈德施密特和他的人类学圈子的成员来说，尤罗克人因金钱的核心作用而闻名 —— 金钱的形式是串在一起的白色牙胶壳，以及用鲜红的啄木鸟头皮制成的头巾 —— 在他们社会生活的各个方面发挥着作用。

It’s worth mentioning here that settlers in different parts of North America referred to a whole variety of things as ‘Indian money’. Often these were shell beads or actual shells. But in almost every case, the term is largely a projection of European categories on to objects that look like money, but really aren’t. Probably the most famous of these, wampum, did eventually come to be used as a trade currency in transactions between settlers and indigenous peoples of the Northeast, and was even accepted as currency in several American states for transactions between settlers (in Massachusetts and New York, for instance, wampum was legal tender in shops). In dealings between indigenous people, however, it was almost never used to buy or sell anything. Rather, it was employed to pay fines, and as a way of forming and remembering compacts and agreements. This was true in California as well. But in California, unusually, money also seems to have been used in more or less the way we expect money to have been used: for purchases, rentals and loans. In California in general, and its northwest corner in particular, the central role of money in indigenous societies was combined with a cultural emphasis on thrift and simplicity, a disapproval of wasteful pleasures, and a glorification of work that – according to Goldschmidt – bore an uncanny resemblance to the Puritan attitudes described by Max Weber in his famous 1905 essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

这里值得一提的是，北美不同地区的定居者将各种各样的东西称为 “印第安人的钱”。这些东西往往是贝壳珠子或真正的贝壳。但几乎在每一种情况下，这个术语在很大程度上是欧洲人对那些看起来像钱但实际上不是钱的东西的一种投射。其中最有名的可能是 wampum，它最终被用作定居者和东北部原住民之间交易的贸易货币，而且，甚至被美洲几个州接受为定居者之间交易的货币（例如在马萨诸塞州和纽约州，wampum 是商店的法定货币）。然而，在原住民之间的交易中，它几乎从未被用来购买或出售任何东西。相反，它被用来支付罚款，以及作为形成和记住契约和协议的一种方式。这在加利福尼亚也是如此。但在加利福尼亚，不同寻常的是，货币的使用方式似乎或多或少与我们期望的货币使用方式相同：用于购买、租赁和贷款。在加利福尼亚，特别是其西北角，货币在原住民社会中的核心作用与强调节俭和简单的文化相结合，不赞成浪费的快乐，以及对工作的颂扬，根据戈德施密特的说法，这与马克斯·韦伯在其 1905 年著名的文章《新教伦理与资本主义精神》中描述的清教徒态度有着惊人的相似之处。

This analogy might seem a bit of a stretch, and in many ways it was. But it’s important to understand the comparison that Goldschmidt was actually making. Weber’s essay, familiar to just about anyone who’s ever taken a social science course, is often misunderstood. Weber was trying to answer a very specific question: why capitalism emerged in western Europe, and not elsewhere. Capitalism, as he defined it, was itself a kind of moral imperative. Almost everywhere in the world, he noted, and certainly in China, India and the Islamic world, one found commerce, wealthy merchants and people who might justly be referred to as ‘capitalists’. But almost everywhere, anyone who acquired an enormous fortune would eventually cash in their chips. They would either buy themselves a palace and enjoy life, or come under enormous moral pressure from their community to spend their profits on religious or public works, or boozy popular festivities (usually they did a bit of both).

这个比喻可能看起来有点牵强，而且在许多方面是这样的。但重要的是，要理解戈德施密特实际上在做的比较。韦伯的文章，几乎所有上过社会科学课程的人都很熟悉，但常常被误解。韦伯试图回答一个非常具体的问题：为什么资本主义出现在西欧，而不是其他地方。按照他的定义，资本主义本身就是一种道德上的要求。他指出，几乎在世界任何地方，当然在中国、印度和伊斯兰世界，人们都能找到商业、富商和可以被公正地称为 “资本家” 的人。但几乎在任何地方，任何获得巨大财富的人最终都会兑现他们的筹码。他们要么给自己买一座宫殿，享受生活，要么承受来自社区的巨大道德压力，将他们的利润用于宗教或公共工程，或用于豪饮的大众庆典（通常他们两者都做）。

Capitalism, on the other hand, involved constant reinvestment, turning one’s wealth into an engine for creating ever more wealth, increasing production, expanding operations, and so forth. But imagine, Weber suggested, being the very first person in one’s community to act this way. To do so would have meant defying all social expectations, to be utterly despised by almost all your neighbours – who would, increasingly, also become your employees. Anyone capable of acting in such a defiantly single-minded manner, Weber observed, would ‘have to be some sort of hero’. This, he said, is the reason why it took a Puritanical strain of Christianity, like Calvinism, to make capitalism possible. Puritans not only believed almost anything they could spend their profits on was sinful; but also, joining a Puritan congregation meant one had a moral community whose support would allow one to endure the hostility of one’s hell-bound neighbours.

另一方面，资本主义涉及不断的再投资，把一个人的财富变成创造更多财富的引擎，增加生产，扩大经营，等等。但是，韦伯建议，想象一下自己是社区中第一个这样做的人。这样做将意味着违背所有的社会期望，被几乎所有的邻居完全鄙视 —— 这些邻居也将越来越多地成为你的雇员。韦伯认为，任何能够以这种挑衅性的单一方式行事的人，“都必须是某种英雄”。他说，这就是为什么基督教的清教徒风格，如加尔文主义，使资本主义成为可能的原因。清教徒不仅认为他们可以把利润花在几乎任何东西上都是有罪的；而且，加入清教会意味着一个人有一个道德社区，其支持将使他能够忍受来自地狱邻居的敌意。

Obviously, none of this was true in an eighteenth-century Yurok village. Aboriginal Californians did not hire one another as wage labourers, lend money at interest, or invest the profits of commercial ventures to expand production. There were no ‘capitalists’ in the literal sense. What there was, however, was a remarkable cultural emphasis on private property. As Goldschmidt notes, all property, whether natural resources, money or items of wealth, was ‘privately (and for the most part individually) owned’, including fishing, hunting and gathering grounds. Individual ownership was complete, with full rights of alienation. Such a highly developed concept of property, Goldschmidt observed, requires the use of money, such that in Northwest California ‘money buys everything – wealth, resources, food, honor and wives.’¹⁹

显然，在 18 世纪的尤罗克村，这些都不是真的。加利福尼亚原住民没有相互雇佣作为工资劳动者，没有借钱付利息，也没有把商业企业的利润用于扩大生产。这里没有字面意义上的 “资本家”。然而，有的只是对私有财产的显著文化强调。正如戈德施密特所指出的，所有财产，无论是自然资源、金钱还是财富物品，都是 “私人（而且大部分是个人）拥有的”，包括捕鱼、狩猎和采集场。个人所有权是完整的，有充分的转让权。戈德施密特指出，这种高度发达的财产概念需要使用金钱，因此在西北加州，“金钱可以购买一切 —— 财富、资源、食物、荣誉和妻子。”¹⁹

This very unusual property regime corresponded to a broad ethos, which Goldschmidt compared to Weber’s ‘spirit’ of capitalism (though, one might object, it corresponds more to how capitalists like to imagine the world than to how capitalism actually works). The Yurok were what we’ve called ‘possessive individualists’. They took it for granted that we are all born equal, and that it is up to each of us to make something of ourselves through self-discipline, self-denial and hard work. What’s more, this ethos appears to have been largely applied in practice.

这种非常不寻常的财产制度对应于一种广泛的精神，戈尔德施密特将其与韦伯的资本主义 “精神” 相提并论（不过，有人可能会反对，它更对应于资本家喜欢想象的世界，而不是资本主义的实际运作方式）。尤罗克人就是我们所说的 “占有型个人主义者”。他们认为，我们生而平等是理所当然的，我们每个人都应该通过自律、自我否定和努力工作来成就自己。更重要的是，这种精神似乎在很大程度上被应用于实践。

As we’ve seen, the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast were just as industrious as those of California, and in both cases those who accumulated wealth were expected to give much of it away by sponsoring collective festivals. The underlying ethos, however, could not have been more different. Where the wealthy Yurok were expected to be modest, Kwakiutl chiefs were boastful and vainglorious; so much so that one anthropologist compared them to paranoid schizophrenics. Where wealthy Yurok made little of their ancestry, Northwest Coast households had much in common with the noble houses and dynastic estates of medieval Europe, in which a class of nobles jockeyed for position within ranks of hereditary privilege, staging dazzling banquets to enhance their reputations and secure their claims to honorific titles and heirloom treasures stretching back to the beginning of time.²⁰

正如我们所看到的，西北海岸的原住民与加利福尼亚的原住民一样勤劳，而且在这两种情况下，那些积累了财富的人都希望通过赞助集体节日来捐出大部分财富。然而，其背后的精神面貌却不尽相同。富裕的 Yurok 人被要求谦虚，而 Kwakiutl 人的首领则夸夸其谈，虚荣心很强；以至于一位人类学家将他们比作偏执的精神分裂症患者。富裕的尤罗克人很少提及他们的祖先，而西北海岸的家庭与中世纪欧洲的贵族家庭和王朝庄园有很多共同之处，其中一个贵族阶层在世袭特权的行列中争夺地位，举办令人眼花缭乱的宴会，以提高他们的声誉，并确保他们对荣誉称号和传家宝的要求延伸到时间开始。²⁰

It’s hard to imagine that the existence of such striking cultural differences between neighbouring populations could be completely coincidental, but it’s also extremely difficult to find any studies that even begin to address the question of how this contrast came about.²¹ Is it possible to see indigenous Californians and peoples of the Northwest Coast as defining themselves against each other, rather in the manner that Californians and New Yorkers do today? If so, then how much of their way of life can we really explain as being motivated by a desire to be unlike other groups of people? Here, we need to bring back our earlier discussion of schismogenesis, which we introduced to help make sense of the intellectual encounter between seventeenth-century French colonists and the Wendat people of North America’s Eastern Woodlands.

很难想象相邻人口之间存在如此明显的文化差异会是完全偶然的，但也极难找到任何研究，甚至开始解决这种对比是如何产生的问题。²¹是否有可能把加利福尼亚原住民和西北海岸的人民看作是相互界定的，而不是像今天的加利福尼亚人和纽约人那样？如果是这样，那么他们的生活方式有多少能被我们真正解释为是出于与其他群体不同的愿望？在这里，我们需要回到我们先前对分裂发生的讨论，我们介绍了这一讨论，以帮助理解十七世纪法国殖民者和北美东部林地的温达特人之间的思想碰撞。

Schismogenesis, you’ll recall, describes how societies in contact with each other end up joined within a common system of differences, even as they attempt to distinguish themselves from one another. Perhaps the classic historical example (in both senses of the term ‘classic’) would be the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta, in the fifth century BC . As Marshall Sahlins puts it:

你会记得，分裂发生描述了相互接触的社会如何在一个共同的差异系统中最终结合起来，即使他们试图将自己与对方区分开来。也许最经典的历史例子（在 “经典” 一词的两种意义上）是公元前五世纪的古希腊城邦雅典和斯巴达。正如马歇尔·萨林斯所说。

Dynamically interconnected, they were then reciprocally constituted … Athens was to Sparta as sea to land, cosmopolitan to xenophobic, commercial to autarkic, luxurious to frugal, democratic to oligarchic, urban to villageois, autochthonous to immigrant, logomanic to laconic: one cannot finish enumerating the dichotomies … Athens and Sparta were antitypes.²²

它们在动态上相互联系，然后相互构成…… 雅典之于斯巴达，就像海洋之于陆地，世界性之于排外性，商业之于自主性，奢华之于节俭，民主之于寡头，城市之于乡村，本土之于移民，逻辑之于简练：我们无法列举出这些二分法…… 雅典和斯巴达是反类型的。²²

Each society performs a mirror image of the other. In doing so, it becomes an indispensable alter ego, the necessary and ever-present example of what one should never wish to be. Might a similar logic apply to the history of foraging societies in California and on the Northwest Coast?

每个社会都扮演着另一个社会的镜像。在这样做的过程中，它成为一个不可缺少的另一个自我，成为一个人永远不应该成为的必要的和永远存在的例子。类似的逻辑是否适用于加利福尼亚和西北海岸的觅食社会的历史？

WHERE WE MAKE A CASE FOR SCHISMOGENESIS BETWEEN ‘PROTESTANT FORAGERS’ AND ‘FISHER KINGS’

在这里，我们为 “新教觅食者” 和 “渔王” 之间的分裂生成提供了一个案例。

Let’s look more closely at what might be described, in Weber’s sense, as the ‘spirit’ of northern Californian foragers. At root, it was a series of ethical imperatives, in Goldschmidt’s words: ‘the moral demand to work and by extension pursuit of gain; the moral demand of self-denial; and the individuation of moral responsibility’.²³ Bound up in this was a passion for individual autonomy as absolute as that of any Kalahari Bushman – even if it took a strikingly different form. Yurok men scrupulously avoided being placed in a situation of debt or ongoing obligation to anyone else. Even the collective management of resources was frowned upon; foraging grounds were individually owned and could be rented out in times of shortfall.

让我们更仔细地看看，在韦伯的意义上，什么可以被描述为加州北部觅食者的 “精神”。从根本上说，它是一系列的道德要求，用戈德施密特的话说，“劳动的道德要求和对收益的追求；自我否定的道德要求；以及道德责任的个体化。”²³与此相联系的是对个人自治的热情，其绝对性不亚于任何卡拉哈里布什曼人 —— 即使它采取了惊人的不同形式。尤罗克人谨慎地避免被置于对其他人的债务或持续义务的境地。甚至对资源的集体管理也不屑一顾；觅食地是个人拥有的，在短缺的时候可以出租。

Property was sacred, and not only in the legal sense that poachers could be shot. It also had a spiritual value. Yurok men would often spend long hours meditating on money, while the highest objects of wealth – precious hides and obsidian blades displayed only at festivals – were the ultimate sacra. Yurok struck outsiders as puritanical in a literal sense as well: as Goldschmidt reports, ambitious Yurok men were ‘exhorted to abstain from any kind of indulgence – eating, sexual gratification, play or sloth’. Big eaters were considered ‘vulgar’. Young men and women were lectured on the need to eat slowly and modestly, to keep their bodies slim and lithe. Wealthy Yurok men would gather every day in sweat lodges, where an almost daily test of these ascetic values was the need to crawl headfirst through a tiny aperture that no overweight body could possibly enter. Repasts were kept bland and spartan, decoration simple, dancing modest and restrained. There were no inherited ranks or titles. Even those who did inherit wealth continued to emphasize their personal hard work, frugality and achievement; and while the rich were expected to be generous towards the less fortunate and look after their own lands and possessions, responsibilities for sharing and caring were modest in comparison with foraging societies almost anywhere else.

财产是神圣的，不仅仅是在法律意义上，偷猎者可以被枪毙。它还具有精神价值。尤罗克人经常会花很长时间冥想金钱，而最高的财富物品 —— 珍贵的皮毛和只有在节日时才展示的黑曜石刀片 —— 则是最终的神圣。尤罗克人在字面意义上也给外人留下了清规戒律的印象：正如戈德施密特报告的那样，雄心勃勃的尤罗克人被 “劝诫不要有任何形式的放纵 —— 饮食、性满足、游戏或怠惰”。大吃特吃的人被认为是 “粗俗”。年轻男子和妇女被教导需要慢慢地、适度地进食，以保持他们的身体苗条和敏捷。富裕的尤罗克人每天都会聚集在汗蒸房里，在那里，几乎每天都要对这些禁欲主义价值观进行测试，即需要头朝下爬过一个超重的身体不可能进入的小孔。饮食保持平淡和简朴，装饰简单，舞蹈谦虚而克制。没有继承的等级或头衔。即使那些继承了财富的人也继续强调他们个人的辛勤工作、节俭和成就；虽然富人被期望对不太幸运的人慷慨解囊，并照顾他们自己的土地和财产，但与几乎其他地方的觅食社会相比，分享和照顾的责任是温和的。

Northwest Coast societies, in contrast, became notorious among outside observers for the delight they took in displays of excess. They were best known to European ethnologists for the festivals called potlatch, usually held by aristocrats acceding to some new noble title (nobles would often accumulate many of these over the course of a lifetime). In these feasts they sought to display their grandeur and contempt for ordinary worldly possessions by performing magnificent feats of generosity, overwhelming their rivals with gallons of candlefish oil, berries and quantities of fatty and greasy fish. Such feasts were scenes of dramatic contests, sometimes culminating in the ostentatious destruction of heirloom copper shields and other treasures, just as in the early period of colonial contact, around the turn of the nineteenth century, they sometimes culminated in the sacrificial killing of slaves. Each treasure was unique; there was nothing that resembled money. Potlatch was an occasion for gluttony and indulgence, ‘grease feasts’ designed to leave the body shiny and fat. Nobles often compared themselves to mountains, with the gifts they bestowed rolling off them like boulders, to flatten and crush their rivals.

西北海岸社会，相反，在外部观察者中，他们因喜欢炫耀而变得臭名昭著。欧洲民族学家对他们最熟悉的是称为 potlatch 的节日，通常是由获得某种新的贵族头衔的贵族举行的（贵族在一生中往往会积累许多这样的头衔）。在这些盛宴中，他们试图展示他们的宏伟和对普通世俗财产的蔑视，表现出巨大的慷慨，用一加仑的烛鱼油、浆果和大量的脂肪和油腻的鱼来压倒他们的竞争者。这种盛宴是戏剧性的竞赛场面，有时会以破坏传家宝铜盾和其他宝物而达到高潮，就像在十九世纪初的殖民接触时期，有时会以牺牲奴隶而达到高潮。每件宝物都是独一无二的；没有任何类似于金钱的东西。Potlatch 是一个贪食和放纵的场合，“油脂盛宴” 旨在让身体变得光亮和肥胖。贵族们经常把自己比作山，他们赠送的礼物像巨石一样从他们身上滚落，以压平和压垮他们的对手。

The Northwest Coast group we know best are the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), among whom Boas conducted fieldwork. They became famous for the exuberant ornamentation of their art – their love of masks within masks – and the theatrical stage effects employed in their rituals, including fake blood, trap doors and violent clown-police. All the surrounding societies – including the Nootka, Haida and Tsimshian – appear to have shared the same broad ethos: similarly dazzling material cultures and performances could be found all the way from Alaska south to the area of Washington State. They also shared the same basic social structure, with hereditary ranks of nobles, commoners and slaves. Throughout this entire region, a 1,500-mile strip of land from the Copper River delta to Cape Mendocino, inter-group raiding for slaves was endemic, and had been for as long as anyone could recall.

我们最熟悉的西北海岸群体是 Kwakwaka'wakw（Kwakiutl），博厄斯在他们中间进行了实地考察。他们因其艺术的华丽装饰而闻名 —— 他们喜欢面具中的面具 —— 以及他们仪式中采用的戏剧性舞台效果，包括假血、陷阱门和暴力的小丑警察。所有周围的社会 —— 包括诺特卡人、海达人和齐姆希安人 —— 似乎都有相同的广泛精神：从阿拉斯加向南到华盛顿州地区，都可以发现类似的令人眼花缭乱的物质文化和表演。他们也有相同的基本社会结构，有贵族、平民和奴隶的世袭等级。在整个地区，从铜河三角洲到门多西诺角的 1500 英里长的土地上，群体间掠夺奴隶的现象十分普遍，而且从人们能记起的时候起就一直如此。

In all these societies of the Northwest Coast, nobles alone enjoyed the ritual prerogative to engage with guardian spirits, who conferred access to aristocratic titles, and the right to keep the slaves captured in raids. Commoners, including brilliant artists and craftspeople, were largely free to decide which noble house they wished to align themselves with; chiefs vied for their allegiance by sponsoring feasts, entertainment and vicarious participation in their heroic adventures. ‘Take good care of your people,’ went the elder’s advice to a young Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) chief. ‘If your people don’t like you, you’re nothing.’²⁴

在西北海岸的所有这些社会中，只有贵族享有与守护神打交道的仪式特权，守护神赋予贵族头衔，并有权保留袭击中捕获的奴隶。平民，包括优秀的艺术家和手工艺人，基本上可以自由决定他们希望，与哪个贵族家族结盟；酋长们通过赞助宴会、娱乐和替代参与他们的英雄冒险来争取他们的效忠。“好好照顾你的人民”，长者对一个年轻的 Nuu-chah-nulth（Nootka）酋长的建议。“如果你的人民不喜欢你，你就什么都不是。”²⁴

In many ways, the behaviour of Northwest Coast aristocrats resembles that of Mafia dons, with their strict codes of honour and patronage relations; or what sociologists speak of as ‘court societies’ – the sort of arrangement one might expect in, say, feudal Sicily, from which the Mafia derived many of its cultural codes.²⁵ But this is emphatically not what we are taught to expect among foragers. Granted, the followers of any one of these ‘fisher-kings’ rarely numbered more than 100 or 200 people, not much larger than the size of a Californian village; in neither the Northwest Coast nor the Californian culture area were there overarching political, economic or religious organizations of any kind. But within the tiny communities that did exist, entirely different principles of social life applied.

在许多方面，西北海岸贵族的行为类似于黑手党成员的行为，他们有严格的荣誉准则和赞助关系；或者社会学家所说的 “宫廷社会” —— 人们可能期望的那种安排，例如在封建的西西里，黑手党的许多文化准则都来自那里。²⁵但是，这显然不是我们被教导要在觅食者中期待的东西。诚然，任何一个 “渔王” 的追随者都很少超过 100 或 200 人，不比一个加利福尼亚村庄的规模大多少；在西北海岸和加利福尼亚文化区都没有任何类型的总体政治、经济或宗教组织。但在那些确实存在的小社区内，适用的社会生活原则完全不同。

All this begins to make the anthropologists’ habit of lumping Yurok notables and Kwakiutl artists together as ‘affluent foragers’ or ‘complex hunter-gatherers’ seem rather silly: the equivalent of saying a Texas oil executive and a medieval Egyptian poet were both ‘complex agriculturalists’ because they ate a lot of wheat.

所有这些开始使人类学家习惯于把尤罗克人和夸库特尔艺术家混为一谈，认为他们是 “富裕的觅食者” 或 “复杂的狩猎采集者”，这看起来相当愚蠢：相当于说一个得克萨斯州的石油主管和一个中世纪的埃及诗人都是 “复杂的农业主义者”，因为他们吃很多小麦。

But how do we explain the differences between these two culture areas? Do we start from the institutional structure (the rank system and importance of potlatch in the Northwest Coast, the role of money and private property in California), then try to understand how the prevailing ethos of each society emerges from it? Or did the ethos come first – a certain conception of the nature of humanity and its role in the cosmos – and did the institutional structures emerge from that? Or are both simply effects of a different technological adaptation to the environment?

但是，我们如何解释这两个文化区之间的差异？我们是否从制度结构入手：西北海岸的等级制度和“锅庄”（potlatch）的重要性，加利福尼亚的金钱和私有财产的作用），然后试图理解每个社会的主流精神如何从中产生？还是先有风气 —— 对人类的本质及其在宇宙中的作用的某种概念 —— 然后制度结构才由此产生？或者两者都只是对环境的不同技术适应的效果？

These are fundamental questions about the nature of society. Theorists have been batting them about for centuries, and probably will be for centuries to come. To put the matter more technically, we might ask what ultimately determines the shape a society takes: economic factors, organizational imperatives or cultural meanings and ideas? Following in the footsteps of Mauss, we might also suggest a fourth possibility. Are societies in effect self-determining, building and reproducing themselves primarily with reference to each other?

这些是关于社会性质的基本问题。几个世纪以来，理论家们一直在讨论这些问题，而且可能在未来的几个世纪里也会如此。说得更专业一点，我们可以问是什么最终决定了一个社会的形态：经济因素、组织需要还是文化意义和思想？ 跟随毛斯的脚步，我们还可以提出第四种可能性。社会是否实际上是自我决定的，主要是通过相互参照来建立和繁殖自己？

There’s a lot riding on the answer we give in this particular case. The indigenous history of the Pacific Coast might not provide a very good model for what the first ‘proto-farmers’ in the Fertile Crescent were like, 10,000 years ago. But it does shed unique light on other kinds of cultural processes, which – as we explored above – have been going on for just as long, if not longer: whereby certain foraging peoples, in particular times and places, came to accept permanent inequalities, structures of domination and the loss of freedoms.

在这个特定的案例中，我们的答案有很大的影响。太平洋沿岸的原住民历史可能无法为 1 万年前新月沃土上的第一批 “原农民” 提供一个很好的模型。但它确实为其他类型的文化进程提供了独特的启示，正如我们在上文所探讨的那样，这些文化进程已经持续了同样长的时间，甚至更久：在特定的时间和地点，某些觅食者开始接受永久性的不平等、统治结构和自由的丧失。

Let’s now go through the possible explanations, one by one.

现在让我们逐一看一下可能的解释。

The most striking difference between the indigenous societies of California and the Northwest Coast is the absence, in California, of formal ranks and the institution of potlatch . The second really follows from the first. In California there were feasts and festivals, to be sure, but since there was no title system, these lacked almost all the distinctive features of potlatch: the division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of cuisine, the use of ranked seating orders and serving equipment, obligatory eating of oily foods, competitive gifting, self-aggrandizing speeches, or any other public manifestations of rivalry between nobles fighting over titular privilege.²⁶

加利福尼亚州的土著社会和西北海岸的土著社会之间最显著的区别是，在加利福尼亚没有正式的等级和锅庄制度。第二点确实是由第一点引起的。在加利福尼亚，肯定有宴会和节日，但由于没有产权制度，这些宴会几乎没有锅庄的所有特征：“高级” 和 “低级” 菜肴的划分，使用有等级的座次和服务设备，强制吃油腻的食物，竞争性的礼物，自我吹嘘的演讲，或任何其他贵族之间为争夺产权而进行竞争的公开表现。²⁶

In many ways, the seasonal gatherings of Californian tribes seem exactly to reverse the principles of potlatch. Staple rather than luxury foods were consumed; ritual dances were playful rather than regimented or menacing, often involving the humorous transgression of social boundaries between men and women, children and elders (they seem to be one of the few occasions when the otherwise staid Yurok allowed themselves to have a bit of fun). Valuables such as obsidian blades and deer skins were never sacrificed or gifted to enemies as a challenge or insult, but carefully unwrapped and passed into the trust of temporary ‘dance leaders’, as if to underline how much their owners wished to avoid drawing undue attention to themselves.²⁷

在许多方面，加利福尼亚部落的季节性聚会似乎完全颠覆了锅庄的原则。他们消费的是主食而不是奢侈的食物；仪式上的舞蹈是嬉戏性的，而不是规整的或有威胁性的，往往涉及到对男女之间、儿童和长者之间社会界限的幽默侵犯（这似乎是为数不多的、在其他方面很沉稳的尤罗克人允许自己有一点乐趣的场合之一）。诸如黑曜石刀片和鹿皮等贵重物品从不作为挑战或侮辱献给敌人，而是小心翼翼地拆开，交给临时的 “舞蹈领袖” 保管，似乎在强调它们的主人多么希望避免引起人们对自己的过分关注。²⁷

Local headmen in California certainly did benefit by hosting such occasions: social connections were made, and an enhanced reputation could often mean later opportunities to make money.²⁸ But insofar as feast sponsors could be seen as self-aggrandizing, they themselves went to great lengths to downplay their roles, and anyway, attributing a secret desire for profit to them seems reductive in the extreme, even rather insulting, considering the actual redistribution of resources that went on in Californian trade feasts and ‘deerskin dances’, and their well-documented importance in promoting solidarity between groups from neighbouring hamlets.²⁹

加利福尼亚州的当地头人当然会从主办这种场合中受益：建立社会关系，提高声誉往往意味着以后有机会赚钱。²⁸但是，只要宴会赞助商可以被视为自我吹嘘，他们自己就会不遗余力地淡化自己的角色，而且无论如何，考虑到加利福尼亚贸易宴会和 “鹿皮舞” 中实际发生的资源再分配，以及它们在促进邻近村庄群体之间的团结方面有据可查的重要性，将秘密的获利欲望归咎于他们似乎是极端的，甚至是相当侮辱的。²⁹

So are we talking about the same basic institution (a ‘redistributive feast’) carried out in an entirely different spirit, or two entirely different institutions, or even, potlatch and anti-potlatch? How are we to tell? Clearly the issue is much broader, and touches on the very nature of ‘culture areas’ and what actually constitutes a threshold or boundary between them. We are looking for a key to this problem. It lies in the institution of slavery, which, as we’ve noted, was endemic on the Northwest Coast but correspondingly absent south of the Klamath River in California.

那么，我们谈论的是以完全不同的精神进行的同一基本制度（“再分配的盛宴”），还是两个完全不同的制度，甚至是，锅庄和反锅庄？我们该如何分辨？显然，这个问题要广泛得多，而且涉及到 “文化区” 的本质，以及什么实际上构成了它们之间的门槛或边界。我们正在寻找这个问题的关键。它在于奴隶制，正如我们所注意到的，奴隶制在西北海岸很普遍，但在加利福尼亚克拉玛斯河以南却相应地没有。

Slaves on the Northwest Coast were hewers of wood and drawers of water, but they were especially involved in the mass harvesting, cleaning and processing of salmon and other anadromous fish. There’s no consensus, however, on how far back the indigenous practice of slavery actually went there. The first European accounts of the region in the late eighteenth century speak of slaves, and express mild surprise in doing so, since full-fledged chattel slavery was quite unusual in other parts of aboriginal North America. These accounts suggest that perhaps a quarter of the indigenous Northwest Coast population lived in bondage – which is about equivalent to proportions found in the Roman Empire, or classical Athens, or indeed the cotton plantations of the American South. What’s more, slavery on the Northwest Coast was a hereditary status: if you were a slave, your children were also fated to be so.³⁰

西北海岸的奴隶是伐木者和汲水者，但他们特别参与了鲑鱼和其他溯河鱼类的大量收获、清洗和加工。然而，对于土著人的奴隶制做法究竟可以追溯到多远，目前还没有共识。十八世纪末欧洲人对该地区的第一份报告提到了奴隶，并对此表示轻微的惊讶，因为成熟的动产奴隶制在北美原住民的其他地区是相当不寻常的。这些记载表明，西北海岸原住民中可能有四分之一的人生活在奴役中 —— 这与罗马帝国、古典雅典或美洲南部的棉花种植园的比例相当。更重要的是，西北海岸的奴隶制是一种世袭的地位：如果你是一个奴隶，你的孩子也注定要成为奴隶。³⁰

Given the limitations of our sources, it’s always possible that these European accounts were describing what was, at the time, a recent innovation. Current archaeological and ethno-historical research, though, suggests that the institution of slavery goes back a very long way indeed on the Northwest Coast, many centuries before European ships began docking at Nootka Sound to trade in otter pelts and blankets.

鉴于我们资料来源的局限性，这些欧洲人的描述总是有可能是在描述当时的一种最新创新。不过，目前的考古和民族历史研究表明，奴隶制在西北海岸确实可以追溯到很久之前，在欧洲船只开始停靠诺特卡湾进行水獭皮和毛毯交易之前的许多个世纪。

CONCERNING THE NATURE OF SLAVERY AND ‘MODES OF PRODUCTION’ MORE GENERALLY

关于奴隶制的性质和更广泛的 “生产方式” 的建议

It’s fiendishly difficult to ‘find slavery’ in the archaeological record, unaided by written records; but on the West Coast we can at least observe how many of the elements that later came together in the institution of slavery emerged at roughly the same time, starting around 1850 BC, in what’s called the Middle Pacific period. This is when we first observe the bulk harvesting of anadromous fish, an incredibly bounteous resource – later travellers recounted salmon runs so massive one could not see the water for the fish – but one that involved a dramatic intensification of labour demands. It’s presumably no coincidence that around this same time, we see also the first signs of warfare and the building of defensive fortifications, and expanding trade networks.³¹ There are also some other pointers.

在没有书面记录的情况下，要在考古记录中 “找到奴隶制” 是非常困难的；但在西海岸，我们至少可以观察到后来在奴隶制中出现的许多元素是如何在大约同一时间出现的，大约从公元前 1850 年开始，即所谓的中太平洋时期。这是我们第一次观察到大量捕捞溯河鱼类，这是一种令人难以置信的丰饶资源 —— 后来的旅行者讲述了鲑鱼的大量繁殖，人们无法看到水里的鱼 —— 但这也涉及到劳动力需求的急剧加强。在同一时期，我们也看到了战争和建造防御工事以及扩大贸易网络的最初迹象，这大概不是巧合。³¹还有一些其他迹象。

Cemeteries of Middle Pacific age, between 1850 BC and AD 200, reveal extreme disparities in treatments of the dead, something not seen in earlier times. At the ‘top end’, the most privileged burials exhibit formal systems of body ornamentation, and the somewhat macabre staging of corpses in seated, reclining or other fixed positions, presumably referencing a strict hierarchy of ritual postures and manners among the living. At the ‘bottom’ we see quite the other extreme: mutilation of certain individuals’ bodies, recycling of human bone to make tools and containers, and the ‘offering’ of people as grave goods (i.e. human sacrifice). The overall impression is of a wide spectrum of formalized statuses, ranging from high rank to people whose lives and deaths appear to have mattered little.³²

公元前 1850 年至公元 200 年之间的中太平洋时代的墓地显示出对死者处理的极端差异，这在早期是看不到的。在 “高端”，最优越的墓葬展示了正式的身体装饰系统，以及将尸体摆成坐姿、卧姿或其他固定的姿势，这大概是指活人之间严格的仪式姿势和礼仪的等级制度。在 “底层”，我们看到了另一个极端：肢解某些人的身体，回收人骨来制作工具和容器，以及将人作为墓地物品来 “献祭”（即人祭）。总的印象是一个广泛的正式身份，从高级别的人到那些生命和死亡似乎都不重要的人。³²

Turning now to California, one thing we can note straight away is the absence of all these features in correspondingly early periods. South of Cape Mendocino we seem to be dealing with a different kind of Middle Pacific – a more ‘pacific’ one, in fact. But we can’t put these differences down to a lack of contact between the two groups. On the contrary, archaeological and linguistic evidence demonstrates extensive movement of people and goods along much of the West Coast. A vibrant, canoe-borne maritime commerce already linked coastal and island societies, conveying valuables such as shell beads, copper, obsidian and a host of organic commodities across the diverse ecologies of the Pacific littoral. Various lines of evidence also point to the movement of human captives as a feature of inter-group warfare and trade. As early as 1500 BC, some parts of the shoreline around the Salish Sea were already equipped with fortifications and shelters, in apparent anticipation of raids.³³

现在转向加利福尼亚，我们可以直接注意到的一件事是，在相应的早期阶段没有所有这些特征。在门多西诺角以南，我们似乎在处理一种不同的中太平洋 —— 事实上是一种更 “和平” 的中太平洋。但我们不能把这些差异归结为两个群体之间缺乏接触。相反，考古学和语言学证据表明，在西海岸的大部分地区，人员和货物都在广泛流动。一个充满活力的、以独木舟为载体的海上贸易已经将沿海和岛屿社会联系在一起，在太平洋沿岸的不同生态环境中运送贝珠、铜、黑曜石和大量有机商品等贵重物品。各种证据也表明，人类俘虏的流动是群体间战争和贸易的一个特点。早在公元前 1500 年，萨利什海周围的一些海岸线已经配备了防御工事和庇护所，显然是为了应对袭击。³³

So far, we have been talking about slavery without really defining the term. This is a little unwise, because Amerindian slavery had certain specific features that make it very different from ancient Greek or Roman household slavery, let alone European plantation slavery in the Caribbean or in America’s Deep South. While slavery of any sort was a fairly unusual institution among indigenous peoples of the Americas, some of these distinctively Amerindian features were shared, at least in their broad outlines, across much of the continent, including the tropics, where the earliest Spanish sources document local forms of slavery back to the fifteenth century AD . The Brazilian anthropologist Fernando Santos-Granero has coined a term for Amerindian societies that possessed these features. He calls them ‘capturing societies’.³⁴

到目前为止，我们一直在谈论奴隶制，却没有真正定义这个词。这有点不明智，因为美洲印第安人的奴隶制有某些特定的特征，使其与古希腊或罗马的家庭奴隶制非常不同，更不用说在加勒比海或美洲南部的欧洲种植园奴隶制了。虽然任何形式的奴隶制在美洲原住民中都是一种相当不寻常的制度，但其中一些明显的美洲印第安人特征在美洲大陆的大部分地区，包括热带地区都有，至少在其大致轮廓上是如此，在那里，最早的西班牙资料记载的当地奴隶制形式可追溯到公元 15 世纪。巴西人类学家费尔南多·桑托斯·格拉内罗为拥有这些特征的美洲印第安人社会创造了一个术语。他称它们为 “捕获社会”（capturing societies）。³⁴

Before exploring what he means, let’s define slavery itself. What makes a slave different from a serf, a peon, captive or inmate is their lack of social ties. In legal terms, at least, a slave has no family, no kin, no community; they can make no promises and forge no ongoing connections with other human beings. This is why the English word ‘free’ is actually derived from a root meaning ‘friend’. Slaves could not have friends because they could not make commitments to others, since they were entirely under someone else’s power and their only obligation was to do exactly what their master said. If a Roman legionary was captured in battle and enslaved, then managed to escape and return home, he had to go through an elaborate process of restoring all his social relationships, including remarrying his wife, since the act of enslaving him was considered to have severed all previous relationships. The West Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson has referred to this as a condition of ‘social death’.³⁵

在探讨他的意思之前，让我们先定义一下奴隶制本身。奴隶与农奴、农民、俘虏或囚犯的不同之处在于他们缺乏社会关系。至少在法律上，奴隶没有家庭、没有亲属、没有社区；他们不能做出任何承诺，也不能与其他人类建立持续的联系。这就是为什么英语中的 “自由” 一词实际上来自于 “朋友” 的词根。奴隶不可能有朋友，因为他们不能对他人做出承诺，因为他们完全处于别人的权力之下，他们唯一的义务就是完全按照主人的要求去做。如果一个罗马军团成员在战斗中被俘并被奴役，然后设法逃脱并回家，他必须经历一个精心设计的过程来恢复他的所有社会关系，包括与妻子再婚，因为奴役他的行为被认为是切断了所有以前的关系。西印度社会学家奥兰多·帕特森将此称为 “社会死亡” 的状况。³⁵

Unsurprisingly, the archetypical slaves are usually war captives, who are typically far from home amid people who owe them nothing. There is another practical reason for turning war captives into slaves. A slave’s master has a responsibility to keep them alive in a fit state to work. Most human beings need a good deal of care and resources, and can usually be considered a net economic loss until they are twelve or sometimes fifteen years old. It rarely makes economic sense to breed slaves – which is why, globally, slaves have so often been the product of military aggression (though many were also products of debt traps, punitive judicial decisions or banditry). Seen one way, a slave-raider is stealing the years of caring labour another society invested to create a work-capable human being.³⁶

不出所料，典型的奴隶通常是战争俘虏，他们通常远离家乡，与那些不欠他们什么的人在一起。把战争俘虏变成奴隶还有另一个实际原因。奴隶的主人有责任让他们在适合工作的状态下活着。大多数人都需要大量的照顾和资源，通常在他们 12 岁或有时 15 岁之前都可以被认为是一种净经济损失。饲养奴隶很少有经济意义 —— 这就是为什么在全球范围内，奴隶往往是军事侵略的产物（尽管许多人也是债务陷阱、惩罚性司法裁决或强盗行为的产物）。从某种意义上说，劫奴者是在窃取另一个社会为创造一个有工作能力的人而投入的多年的关怀性劳动。³⁶

What, then, do Amerindian ‘capturing societies’ have in common which makes them distinctive from other kinds of slave-holding societies? On the face of it, not much. And least of all their modes of subsistence, which were about as diverse as could be imagined. As Santos-Granero points out, in Northwest Amazonia the dominant peoples were sedentary horticulturalists and fishermen living along the largest rivers, who raided the nomadic hunting-gathering bands of the hinterland. By contrast, in the Paraguay River basin it was semi-itinerant hunter-gatherers who raided or subjugated village agriculturalists. In southern Florida the hegemonic groups (Calusa, in this case) were fishermen-gatherers who lived in large, permanent villages but moved seasonally to fishing and gathering sites, raiding both fishing and farming communities.³⁷

那么，美洲印第安人的 “捕获社会” 有什么共同点，使它们与其他类型的奴隶制社会不同？从表面上看，没有什么。尤其是他们的生存方式，其多样性是可想而知的。正如桑托斯·格拉内罗所指出的，在亚马逊河西北部，主导民族是居住在最大河流沿岸的定居园艺家和渔民，他们袭击了腹地的游牧狩猎采集队。相比之下，在巴拉圭河流域，是半流动的狩猎采集者袭击或征服了乡村农业者。在佛罗里达州南部，霸权群体（这里是卡鲁萨）是渔民·采集者，他们生活在大型的永久性村庄，但季节性地移动到捕鱼和采集地点，袭击渔业和农业社区。³⁷

Classifying these groups according to how much they farmed, fished or hunted tells us little of their actual histories. What really mattered, in terms of the ebb and flow of power and resources, was their use of organized violence to ‘feed off’ other populations. Sometimes the foraging peoples – such as the Guaicurú of the Paraguay palm savannah, or the Calusa of Florida Keys – had the upper hand militarily over their agricultural neighbours. In such cases, taking slaves and exacting tribute exempted a portion of the dominant society from basic subsistence chores, and supported the existence of leisured elites. It also supported the training of specialized warrior castes, which in turn created the means for further appropriation and further tribute.

根据他们耕种、捕鱼或狩猎的多少来对这些群体进行分类，并没有告诉我们他们的实际历史。就权力和资源的起伏而言，真正重要的是他们使用有组织的暴力来 “吸食” 其他人口。有时觅食民族 —— 如巴拉圭棕榈草原的瓜库鲁人或佛罗里达群岛的卡鲁萨人 —— 在军事上比他们的农业邻居占优势。在这种情况下，抓捕奴隶和征收贡品使统治社会的一部分人免于从事基本的生活琐事，并支持有收入的精英阶层的存在。它还支持训练专门的战士种姓，这反过来又为进一步占有和进一步进贡创造了条件。

Here, again, the idea of classifying human societies by ‘modes of subsistence’ looks decidedly naive. How, for instance, would we propose to classify foragers who consume quantities of domestic crops, exacted as tribute from nearby farming populations? Marxists, who refer to ‘modes of production’, do sometimes allow for a ‘Tributary Mode,’ but this has always been linked to the growth of agrarian states and empires, back to Book III of Marx’s Capital .³⁸ What really needs to be theorized here is not just the mode of production practised by victims of predation, but also that of the non-producers who prey on them. Now wait. A non-productive mode of production? This sounds like a contradiction in terms. But it’s only so if we limit the meaning of ‘production’ strictly to the creation of food or goods. And maybe we shouldn’t.

在这里，按照 “生存模式” 对人类社会进行分类的想法也显得很天真。例如，我们将如何对那些消费大量国内作物的觅食者进行分类，这些作物是从附近的农业人口那里收取的贡品？提到 “生产模式” 的马克思主义者，有时确实允许 “贡品模式”，但这一直与农业国家和帝国的增长有关，可以追溯到马克思《资本论》第三卷。³⁸这里真正需要理论化的不仅仅是掠夺的受害者所实行的生产模式，而且还有掠夺他们的非生产者的生产模式。现在等等。一个非生产性的生产方式？这听起来像是一个矛盾的说法。但只有当我们把 “生产” 的含义严格限制在创造食物或商品上时才会如此。也许我们不应该这样。

‘Capturing societies’ in the Americas considered slave-taking as a mode of subsistence in its own right, but not in the usual sense of producing calories. Raiders almost invariably insisted that slaves were captured for their life force or ‘vitality’ – vitality which was consumed by the conquering group.³⁹ Now, you might say this is literally true: if you exploit another human being for their labour, either directly or indirectly, you are living off their energies or life force; and if they are providing you with food, you are in fact eating it. But there is slightly more going on here.

美洲的 “捕获社会” 认为捕获奴隶本身就是一种生存方式，但不是通常意义上的生产卡路里。袭击者几乎无一例外地坚持认为，捕获奴隶是为了他们的生命力或 “活力” —— 被征服的群体所消耗的活力。³⁹现在，你可能会说这在字面上是正确的：如果你直接或间接地剥削另一个人的劳动，你就是靠他们的能量或生命力生活；如果他们为你提供食物，你实际上是在吃。但这里的情况稍有不同。

Let’s recall Amazonian ideas of ownership. You appropriate something from nature, killing or uprooting it, but then this initial act of violence is transformed into a relation of caring, as you maintain and tend what is captured. Slave-raiding was talked about in similar terms, as hunting (traditionally men’s work), and captives were likened to vanquished prey. Experiencing social death, they would come to be regarded as something more like ‘pets’. While being re-socialized in their captors’ households they had to be nurtured, cooked for, fed and instructed in the proper ways of civilization; in short, domesticated (these tasks were usually women’s work). If the socialization was completed, the captive ceased to be a slave. However, captives could sometimes be kept suspended in social death, as part of a permanent pool of victims awaiting their actual, physical death. Typically they would be killed at collective feasts (akin to the Northwest Coast potlatch) presided over by ritual specialists, and this would sometimes result in the eating of enemy flesh.⁴⁰

让我们回顾一下亚马逊人的所有权观念。你从自然界占有某样东西，杀死或拔掉它，但随后这种最初的暴力行为被转化为一种关怀的关系，因为你维护和照料所捕获的东西。掠夺奴隶是以类似的术语谈论的，就像狩猎（传统上是男人的工作），俘虏被比喻为被征服的猎物。经历了社会死亡，他们将被视为更像 “宠物” 的东西。当他们在俘虏的家庭中被重新社会化时，他们必须被培养，被烹饪，被喂养，并被指导以适当的文明方式；总之，被驯化（这些任务通常是妇女的工作）。如果社会化的工作完成了，俘虏就不再是奴隶。然而，俘虏有时会在社会死亡中被悬空，成为等待他们真正身体死亡的永久受害者的一部分。通常情况下，他们会在由仪式专家主持的集体宴会（类似于西北海岸的锅庄）上被杀死，这有时会导致吃敌人的肉。⁴⁰

All this may seem exotic. However, it echoes the way exploited people everywhere and throughout history tend to feel about their situation: their bosses, or landlords, or superiors are blood-sucking vampires, and they are treated at best as pets and at worst as cattle. It’s just that in the Americas, a handful of societies enacted those relationships in a quite literal fashion. The more important point, concerning ‘modes of production’ or ‘modes of subsistence’, is that this kind of exploitation often took the form of ongoing relations between societies. Slavery almost always tends to do this, since imposing ‘social death’ on people whose biological relatives speak the same language as you and can easily travel to where you live will always create problems.

这一切可能看起来很奇特。然而，它呼应了历史上各地被剥削者对自己处境的感受：他们的老板、地主或上级是吸血的吸血鬼，他们最好被当作宠物，最坏被当作牲口。只是在美洲，少数社会以一种相当直白的方式颁布了这些关系。关于 “生产模式” 或 “生存模式”，更重要的一点是，这种剥削往往采取社会之间持续关系的形式。奴隶制几乎总是倾向于这样做，因为将 “社会死亡” 强加给那些其生物亲属与你说同样的语言并能轻易前往你居住地的人，总是会产生问题。

Let’s recall how some of the first European travellers to the Americas compared ‘savage’ males to noblemen back home – because, like these noblemen, they dedicated almost all their time to politics, hunting, raiding and waging war on neighbouring groups. A German observer in 1548 spoke of Arawakan villagers of the Grand Chaco in Paraguay as serfs of Guaicurú foragers, ‘in the same way as German rustics are with respect to their lords’. The implication was that little really separates a Guaicurú warrior from a Swabian feudal baron, who likely spoke French at home, feasted regularly on wild game and lived off the labour of German-speaking peasants, even though he had never touched a plough. At what point, we might then ask, were the Guaicurú, who lived amid piles of maize, manioc (cassava) and other agricultural products delivered as tribute, as well as slaves secured in raids on societies even further distant, no longer simply ‘hunter-gatherers’ (especially if they were also hunting and gathering other humans)?

让我们回顾一下，一些最早来到美洲的欧洲旅行者是如何将 “野蛮人” 男性与家乡的贵族相提并论的 —— 因为他们与这些贵族一样，几乎将所有的时间都用于政治、狩猎、袭击和向邻近的群体发动战争。1548 年，一位德国观察员谈到巴拉圭大查科地区的阿拉瓦卡人村民是瓜伊库鲁人的农奴，“就像德国乡下人对他们的领主一样”。意思是说，瓜库鲁战士和斯瓦比亚封建男爵之间没有什么真正的区别，后者很可能在家里讲法语，经常吃野味，靠讲德语的农民的劳动生活，尽管他从来没有碰过犁。那么，我们可能会问，生活在成堆的玉米、木薯和其他作为贡品的农产品中的瓜库鲁人，以及在对更遥远的社会的袭击中获得的奴隶，在什么时候不再是简单的 “狩猎·采集者”（尤其是如果他们也在狩猎和采集其他人类的话）？

True, crops were sent as tribute from nearby conquered villages, but tributary villages also sent servants, and raids on villages further out tended to concentrate on enslaving women, who could serve as concubines, nursemaids and domestics – allowing Guaicurú ‘princesses’, their bodies often completely covered with intricate tattoos and spiral designs painted on daily by their domestics, to devote their days to leisure. Early Spanish commentators always remarked that Guaicurú treated their slaves with care and even tenderness, almost exactly as they did their pet parrots and dogs,⁴¹ but what was really going on here? If slavery is the theft of labour that other societies invest in bringing up children, and the main purpose to which slaves were put was caring for children, or attending to and grooming a leisure class, then, paradoxically, the main objective of slave-taking for the ‘capturing society’ seems to have been to increase its internal capacity for caring labour. What was ultimately being produced here, within Guaicurú society, were certain kinds of people: nobles, princesses, warriors, commoners, servants, and so on.⁴²

的确，附近被征服的村庄会送来农作物作为贡品，但支流村庄也会送来仆人，对更远的村庄的袭击往往集中在奴役妇女上，她们可以充当小妾、保姆和家政服务员 —— 这使得瓜库鲁的 “公主” 们可以将自己的身体完全覆盖在复杂的纹身和家政服务员每天绘制的螺旋形图案上，把日子过成休闲。早期的西班牙评论家总是说，瓜库鲁人对待他们的奴隶很细心，甚至很温柔，几乎和他们对待宠物鹦鹉和狗一模一样。⁴¹但在这里，到底发生了什么？如果奴隶制是对其他社会在抚养儿童方面投入的劳动的偷窃，而奴隶被投入的主要目的是照顾儿童，或照顾和梳理休闲阶层，那么，矛盾的是，对 “捕获社会” 来说，捕获奴隶的主要目的似乎是增加其内部的照顾性劳动能力。在瓜库鲁社会中，最终被生产出来的是某些类型的人：贵族、公主、战士、平民、仆人，等等。⁴²

What needs emphasizing – since it will become extremely important as our story unfolds – is the profound ambivalence, or perhaps we might better say double-edged-ness, of these caring relationships. Amerindian societies typically referred to themselves by some term that can be roughly translated as ‘human beings’ – most of the tribal names traditionally applied to them by Europeans are derogatory terms used by their neighbours (‘Eskimo’, for example, means ‘people who don’t cook their fish’, and ‘Iroquois’ is derived from an Algonkian term meaning ‘vicious killers’). Almost all these societies took pride in their ability to adopt children or captives – even from among those whom they considered the most benighted of their neighbours – and, through care and education, turn them into what they considered to be proper human beings. Slaves, it follows, were an anomaly: people who were neither killed nor adopted, but who hovered somewhere in between; abruptly and violently suspended in the midpoint of a process that should normally lead from prey to pet to family. As such, the captive as slave becomes trapped in the role of ‘caring for others’, a non-person whose work is largely directed towards enabling those others to become persons, warriors, princesses, ‘human beings’ of a particularly valued and special kind.

需要强调的是 —— 因为随着我们故事的展开，它将变得极其重要 —— 是这些关爱关系的深刻的矛盾性，或许我们可以说是双刃剑。美洲印第安人社会通常用一些可以粗略翻译为 “人类” 的术语来称呼自己 —— 欧洲人传统上对他们使用的大多数部落名称都是他们的邻居使用的贬义词（例如，“爱斯基摩人” 意味着 “不煮鱼的人”，而 “易洛魁人” 则来自阿尔冈克人的术语，意思是 “邪恶的杀人者”）。几乎所有这些社会都为他们有能力收养儿童或俘虏而感到自豪 —— 甚至是从那些他们认为最不幸的邻居中收养的 —— 并且通过照顾和教育，把他们变成他们认为合适的人。由此可见，奴隶是一种反常现象：他们既没有被杀害，也没有被收养，而是徘徊在两者之间；在一个通常应该从猎物到宠物再到家庭的过程中，突然被暴力地中止。因此，作为奴隶的俘虏被困在 “照顾他人” 的角色中，一个非人，其工作主要是为了使这些人成为人，战士，公主，一个特别有价值和特殊的 “人”。

As these examples show, if we want to understand the origins of violent domination in human societies, this is precisely where we need to look. Mere acts of violence are passing; acts of violence transformed into caring relations have a tendency to endure. Now that we have a clearer idea of what Amerindian slavery actually involved, let us return to the Pacific Coast of North America and try to understand some of the specific conditions that made chattel slavery so prevalent on the Northwest Coast, and so unusual in California. We’ll start with a piece of oral history, an old story.

正如这些例子所示，如果我们想了解人类社会中暴力统治的起源，这正是我们需要寻找的地方。单纯的暴力行为是过眼云烟；转化为关爱关系的暴力行为则有持续存在的趋势。现在我们对美洲印第安人的奴隶制实际涉及的内容有了更清楚的认识，让我们回到北美的太平洋海岸，并尝试了解使动产奴隶制在西北海岸如此盛行，而在加利福尼亚如此不寻常的一些具体条件。我们将从一段口述历史开始，一个古老的故事。

IN WHICH WE CONSIDER ‘THE STORY OF THE WOGIES’ – AN INDIGENOUS CAUTIONARY TALE ABOUT THE DANGERS OF TRYING TO GET RICH QUICK BY ENSLAVING OTHERS (AND INDULGE OURSELVES IN AN ASIDE ON ‘GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL’)

其中，我们考虑了 “wogies 的故事” —— 一个关于试图通过奴役他人快速致富的危险的本土警示故事（并在 “枪支、病菌和钢铁” 方面放纵自己）。

The story we’re about to recount is first attested in 1873 by the geographer A. W. Chase. Chase claims it was related to him by people of the Chetco Nation of Oregon. It concerns the origins of the word ‘Wogie’ (pronounced ‘Wâgeh’), which across much of the coastal region was an indigenous term for white settlers. The story didn’t really register among scholars; it was repeated a couple of times in the following half-century or so, but otherwise that was it. Yet this long-overlooked story contains some precious gems of information, especially about indigenous attitudes to slavery, at precisely the interface between California and the Northwest Coast that we’ve been exploring.

我们要讲述的故事是由地理学家 A·W·契斯在 1873 年首次证实的。切斯称这是俄勒冈州切特科部落的人告诉他的。它涉及到 “Wogie”（发音为 “Wâgeh”）这个词的起源，在沿海地区的大部分地区，这个词是对白人定居者的一个土著术语。这个故事并没有在学者中得到真正的认可；在随后的半个多世纪里，它被重复了几次，但除此之外就没有了。然而，这个长期被忽视的故事包含了一些珍贵的信息，特别是关于原住民对奴隶制的态度，而这恰恰是我们一直在探索的加利福尼亚和西北海岸之间的交汇点。

Barely a handful of Chetco exist today. Originally dominating the southern shoreline of Oregon, they were largely wiped out in genocidal massacres carried out by invading settlers in the mid nineteenth century. By the 1870s, a small number of survivors were living in the Siletz Reservation, now in Lincoln County. This is what their ancestors told Chase about their origins and where they had come from:

今天几乎没有几个切特科人存在。他们最初在俄勒冈州的南部海岸线上占主导地位，但在十九世纪中期入侵的定居者进行的种族灭绝式的大屠杀中，他们基本上被消灭了。到 19 世纪 70 年代，少数幸存者生活在西利茨保留地，即现在的林肯县。这是他们的祖先告诉契斯的关于他们的起源和他们的来历。

The Chetkos say that, many seasons ago, their ancestors came in canoes from the far north, and landed at the river’s mouth. They found two tribes in possession, one a warlike race, resembling themselves; these they soon conquered and exterminated. The other was a diminutive people, of an exceedingly mild disposition, and white. These called themselves, or were called by the new-comers, ‘Wogies.’ They were skillful in the manufacture of baskets, robes, and canoes, and had many methods of taking game and fish which were unknown to the invaders. Refusing to fight, the Wogies were made slaves of, and kept at work to provide food and shelter and articles of use for the more warlike race, who waxed very fat and lazy. One night, however, after a grand feast, the Wogies packed up and fled, and were never more seen. When the first white men appeared, the Chetkos supposed that they were the Wogies returned. They soon found out their mistake, however, but retained among themselves the appellation for the white men, who are known as Wogies by all the coast tribes in the vicinity.⁴³

切特科人说，许多年前，他们的祖先乘坐独木舟从遥远的北方来到这里，并在河口登陆。他们发现有两个部落，一个是好战的种族，与他们自己相似；他们很快就征服并消灭了这些部落。另一个是一个矮小的民族，性格极其温和，是白人。这些人自称，或被新来的人称为 “Wogies”。他们善于制造篮子、长袍和独木舟，并有许多入侵者不知道的捕猎和捕鱼方法。Wogies 人拒绝战斗，他们被当作奴隶，一直在工作，为更善于战斗的种族提供食物和住所以及使用的物品，他们变得非常肥胖和懒惰。然而，有一天晚上，在一场盛大的宴会之后，Wogies 人收拾东西逃走了，再也没有人看到他们。当第一批白人出现时，切特科人认为他们是 Wogies 人回来了。然而，他们很快就发现了自己的错误，但在他们中间保留了对白人的称呼，附近的所有海岸部落都把他们称为 Wogies。⁴³

The tale might seem unassuming, but there’s a lot packed into it. That the survivors of a forager group on the Oregon coast should narrate Euro-American colonization as an act of historical vengeance is unsurprising.⁴⁴ Neither is there anything implausible about an indigenous slave-holding society migrating south by sea into new territory, at some remote time, and either subjugating or killing the autochthonous inhabitants.⁴⁵

这个故事看似平淡无奇，但其中包含了很多内容。俄勒冈州海岸的一个觅食者群体的幸存者将欧美殖民化说成是一种历史复仇行为，这并不令人惊讶。⁴⁴在某个遥远的年代，一个拥有奴隶的本土社会通过海路向南迁移到新的领土，并征服或杀害本土居民，这也没有什么不可信的。⁴⁵

Similarly to the Guaicurú, the aggressors appear to have made a point of subduing people with skills they themselves lacked. What the ‘proto-Chetco’ acquired was not just physical brawn (‘Wogie labour’) or even care, but the accumulated savoir-faire of a hunter-fisher-forager people not entirely unlike themselves and, according to the story at least, in many respects more capable.

与瓜库鲁人类似，侵略者似乎也是以他们自己缺乏的技能来征服人们。原切特科人 “获得的不仅仅是体力（Wogie 的劳动），甚至是关心，而是一个与他们自己并不完全不同的狩猎·捕鱼·觅食民族所积累的聪明才智，至少根据这个故事，他们在许多方面更有能力。

Another intriguing feature of this story is its setting. The Chetco lived in the intermediate zone between our two major culture regions, precisely where one would imagine the institution of slavery to be most explicitly debated and contested. And indeed, the story has a distinctly ethical flavour, as if it were a cautionary tale aimed at anyone tempted to render others slaves, or acquire wealth and leisure through raiding. Having forced their victims into servitude, growing ‘fat and lazy’ on the proceeds, it’s the Chetcos’ newfound sloth that makes them unable to pursue the fleeing Wogies. The Wogies come out of the whole affair on top by virtue of their pacifism, industriousness, craft skills and capacity for innovation; indeed, they get to make a lethal return – in spirit, at least – as Euro-American settlers equipped with ‘guns, germs, and steel’.⁴⁶

这个故事的另一个耐人寻味的特点是其背景。切特科人生活在我们两个主要文化区域之间的中间地带，正是人们想象中对奴隶制进行最明确辩论和争论的地方。事实上，这个故事具有明显的伦理色彩，就像一个警告故事，针对的是任何试图使他人成为奴隶，或通过掠夺获得财富和休闲的人。在强迫他们的受害者成为奴隶，并在收益上变得 “肥胖和懒惰” 之后，切特科的新发现的懒惰使他们无法追击逃离的 Wogies。Wogies 凭借他们的和平主义、勤劳、工艺技能和创新能力在整个事件中脱颖而出；事实上，他们得到了致命的回报 —— 至少在精神上 —— 作为配备了 “枪支、细菌和钢铁” 的欧美定居者。⁴⁶

Taking this into account, the tale of the Wogies points to some intriguing possibilities. Most importantly, it indicates that the rejection of slavery among groups in the region between California and the Northwest Coast had strong ethical and political dimensions. And indeed, once one starts looking, it’s not hard to find further evidence for this. The Yurok, for example, did hold a small number of slaves, mainly debt peons or captives not yet ransomed by their relatives. But their legends evince a strong disapproval. To take one example, a heroic protagonist makes his fame by defeating a maritime adventurer named Le’mekwelolmei, who would pillage and enslave passing travellers. After defeating him in combat, our hero rejects his appeal to join forces:

考虑到这一点，Wogies 人的故事指出了一些令人感兴趣的可能性。最重要的是，它表明在加利福尼亚和西北海岸之间的地区，各群体对奴隶制的拒绝具有强烈的伦理和政治色彩。而且，一旦开始寻找，就不难找到进一步的证据。例如，尤罗克人确实持有少量的奴隶，主要是债务人或尚未被其亲属赎回的俘虏。但他们的传说显示出强烈的反对意见。举个例子，一个英雄的主人公通过打败一个名叫 Le'mekwelolmei 的海上冒险家而成名，这个冒险家会掠夺和奴役过往的旅行者。在战斗中击败他后，我们的英雄拒绝了他的联合呼吁。

‘No, I do not want to be like you, summoning boats to the shore, seizing them and their cargo, and making people slaves. As long as you live you will never be tyrannous again, but like other men.’

“不，我不想像你一样，把船召到岸边，扣押它们和它们的货物，让人们成为奴隶。只要你活着，你就不会再暴虐，而是像其他人一样。”

‘I will do so,’ said Le’mekwelolmei.

“我将这样做”，Le'mekwelolmei 说。

‘If you return to your former ways, I will kill you. Perhaps I should take you for a slave now, but I will not. Stay in your home and keep what is yours and leave people alone.’ To the slaves who stood about nearly filling the river bank, he said, ‘Go to your homes. You are free now.’

“如果你回到你以前的方式，我会杀了你。也许我现在应该把你当作奴隶，但我不会。留在你的家里，保留属于你的东西，不要打扰别人。” 对那些几乎站满了河岸的奴隶，他说：“回你们的家吧。你们现在是自由的。”

The people who had been enslaved surrounded him, weeping and thanking him and wanting to drag his boat back to the water. ‘No, I will drag it myself,’ he said, and then with one hand he lifted it to the river. So the freed people all scattered, some down-river and some upriver to their homes.⁴⁷

被奴役的人们围着他，哭泣着感谢他，想把他的船拖回水中。他说：“不，我自己来拖”，然后用一只手把它举到河边。于是，获得自由的人们都散开了，有的顺流而下，有的逆流而上，回到自己的家。⁴⁷

Northwest Coast-style maritime raiding was in no sense celebrated, to say the least.

至少可以说，西北海岸式的海上突袭在某种意义上并不值得称道。

Still, one might ask: might there not be a more straightforward explanation for the prevalence of slavery on the Northwest Coast, and its absence further south? It’s easy to express moral disapproval of a practice if there’s not much economic incentive to practise it anyway. An ecological determinist would almost necessarily argue this, and in fact there is a body of literature that makes just such an argument for the Pacific Coast – and it’s about the only literature that does actually take on the question of why different coastal societies looked so different in the first place. This is a branch of behavioural ecology called ‘optimal foraging theory’. Its proponents make some interesting points. Before proceeding, then, let us consider them.

不过，人们可能会问：对于西北海岸普遍存在的奴隶制，以及更南边没有奴隶制的情况，可能没有更直接的解释吗？如果没有太多的经济动机来实行一种做法，那么对这种做法表示道德上的反对是很容易的。一个生态决定论者几乎必然会这样论证，事实上，有一组文献对太平洋海岸进行了这样的论证 —— 这也是唯一的文献，它确实对为什么不同的沿海社会看起来如此不同的问题进行了探讨。这是行为生态学的一个分支，称为 “最佳觅食理论”。其支持者提出了一些有趣的观点。在继续之前，让我们考虑一下这些观点。

IN WHICH WE ASK: WOULD YOU RATHER FISH, OR GATHER ACORNS?

在其中我们问：你是想钓鱼，还是想收集橡子？

Optimal foraging theory is a style of predictive modelling that originates in the study of non-human species such as starlings, honeybees or fish. Applied to humans, it typically frames behaviour in terms of economic rationality, i.e.: ‘foragers will design their hunting and collecting strategies with the intention of obtaining a maximum return in calories, for a minimum outlay of labour.’ This is what behavioural ecologists call a ‘cost-benefit’ calculation. First you figure out how foragers ought to act, if they are trying to be as efficient as possible. Then you examine how they do in fact act. If it doesn’t correspond to the optimum foraging strategy, something else must be going on.

最佳觅食理论是一种预测模型，起源于对非人类物种的研究，如椋鸟、蜜蜂或鱼类。应用到人类身上，它通常从经济理性的角度来框定行为，即：“觅食者将设计他们的狩猎和采集策略，目的是以最小的劳动支出获得最大的卡路里回报”。这就是行为生态学家所说的 “成本·效益” 计算。首先，你要弄清楚，如果觅食者试图尽可能地有效，他们应该如何行动。然后你检查他们事实上是如何行动的。如果它不符合最佳的觅食策略，那么一定是发生了别的事情。

From this perspective, the behaviour of indigenous Californians was far from optimal. As we’ve noted, they relied primarily on gathering acorns and pine nuts as staples. In a region as bounteous as California, there’s no obvious reason to do this. Acorns and pine nuts offer tiny individual food packages and require a great deal of labour to process. To render them edible, most varieties require the back-breaking work of leaching and grinding to be carried out, to remove toxins and release nutrients. Nut yields can vary dramatically from one season to the next, a risky pattern of boom and bust. At the same time, fish are found in abundance from the Pacific Coast inland at least as far as the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Fish are both more nutritious and more reliable than nuts. Despite this, salmon and other aquatic foods generally came second to tree crops in Californian diets, and this seems to have been the case long before the arrival of Europeans.⁴⁸

从这个角度来看，加州土著人的行为远非最佳。正如我们所指出的，他们主要依靠采集橡子和松子作为主食。在加利福尼亚这样一个富饶的地区，没有明显的理由这样做。橡子和松子提供微小的单独食物包，需要大量的劳动力来加工。为了使它们可以食用，大多数品种需要进行艰苦的浸出和研磨工作，以去除毒素和释放营养物质。坚果的产量在不同的季节会有很大的变化，这是一种有风险的繁荣和衰退模式。同时，从太平洋海岸向内陆至少到萨克拉门托河和圣华金河的汇合处，都有大量的鱼。鱼类比坚果更有营养，也更可靠。尽管如此，在加利福尼亚人的饮食中，鲑鱼和其他水生食物通常排在树木作物之后，而且在欧洲人到来之前，情况似乎早已如此。⁴⁸

In terms of ‘optimal foraging theory’, then, the behaviour of Californians simply makes no sense. Salmon can be harvested and processed in great quantities on an annual basis, and they provide oil and fats as well as protein. In terms of cost-benefit calculations, the peoples of the Northwest Coast are eminently more sensible than Californians, and have been for hundreds or even thousands of years.⁴⁹ Granted, they also had little choice, since nut-gathering was never a serious option on the Northwest Coast (the main forest species there are conifers). It’s also true that Northwest Coast peoples enjoyed a greater range of fish than Californians, including eulachon (candlefish), intensively exploited for its oil, which was both a staple food and a core ingredient in ‘grease feasts,’ where nobles ladled great quantities of this stuff on to the burning hearth, and occasionally on to one another. But the Californians did have a choice.

那么，就 “最佳觅食理论” 而言，加利福尼亚人的行为根本没有意义。鲑鱼可以每年大量收获和加工，它们提供油和脂肪以及蛋白质。就成本效益的计算而言，西北海岸的人民显然比加利福尼亚人更明智，而且几百年甚至几千年来都是如此。⁴⁹ 当然，他们也没有什么选择，因为采集坚果在西北海岸从来不是一个严肃的选择（那里的主要森林物种是针叶树）。另外，西北海岸人确实比加利福尼亚人享有更多的鱼类，包括因油而被大量开采的 Eulachon（烛鱼），它既是主食，也是 “油宴” 的核心成分，贵族们将大量的这种东西舀到燃烧的壁炉上，偶尔也舀到彼此身上。但加利福尼亚人确实有一个选择。

California, then, is an ecological puzzle. Most of its indigenous inhabitants appear to have prided themselves on their hard work, clear-sighted practicality and prudence in monetary affairs – quite unlike the wild and excessive self-image of Northwest Coast chiefs, who liked to boast that they ‘didn’t care about anything’ – but as it turns out, the Californians were the ones basing their entire regional economy on apparently irrational choices. Why did they choose to intensify the use of oak groves and pinion stands when so many rich fisheries were available?

那么，加利福尼亚是一个生态学难题。其大多数原住居民似乎都为自己的辛勤工作、清晰的实用性和对货币事务的谨慎而感到自豪 —— 与西北海岸酋长的狂野和过度的自我形象完全不同，他们喜欢吹嘘自己 “什么都不在乎” —— 但事实证明，加利福尼亚人是将其整个区域经济建立在明显不合理的选择之上的人。既然有这么多丰富的渔业资源，他们为什么还要选择加强对橡树林和松树林的利用？

Ecological determinists sometimes try to solve the puzzle by appealing to food security. Brigands like Le’mekwelolmei might have been seen as villains, at least in some quarters, but brigands, they argue, will always exist. And what is more attractive to thieves and raiders than stockpiles of already processed, easy-to-transport food? But dead fish, for reasons that should be obvious to all of us, cannot be left lying around. They must be either eaten immediately or cleaned, filleted, dried and smoked to prevent infestation. On the Northwest Coast these tasks were completed like clockwork in the spring and summer, because they were critical for the group’s physical survival, and also its social survival in the competitive feasting exploits of the winter season.⁵⁰

生态决定论者有时试图通过呼吁粮食安全来解决这个难题。像 Le'mekwelolmei 这样的强盗可能被视为恶棍，至少在某些方面是这样，但他们认为，强盗永远存在。还有什么比储存已经加工好的、易于运输的食物对小偷和袭击者更有吸引力？但是，死鱼，由于对我们所有人来说都是显而易见的原因，不能随意丢弃。它们必须被立即吃掉，或者被清洗、切片、晒干和熏制，以防止虫害。在西北海岸，这些工作像钟表一样在春夏两季完成，因为它们对群体的物质生存至关重要，而且在冬季的竞争性宴请活动中也是社会生存的关键。⁵⁰

In the technical language of behavioural ecology, fish are ‘front-loaded’. You have to do most of the work of preparation right away. As a result, one could argue that a decision to rely heavily on fish – while undoubtedly sensible in purely nutritional terms – is also weaving a noose for one’s own neck. It meant investing in the creation of a storable surplus of processed and packaged foods (not just preserved meat, but also fats and oils), which also meant creating an irresistible temptation for plunderers.⁵¹ Acorns and nuts, on the other hand, present neither such risks nor such temptations. They are ‘back-loaded’. Harvesting them was a simple and fairly leisurely affair,⁵² and, crucially, there was no need for processing prior to storage. Instead most of the hard work took place only just before consumption: leaching and grinding to make porridges, cakes and biscuits. (This is the very opposite of smoked fish, which you don’t even have to cook if you don’t want to.)

用行为生态学的技术语言来说，鱼是 “前装”（front-loaded）的。你必须马上做大部分的准备工作。因此，人们可以说，严重依赖鱼类的决定 —— 虽然从纯粹的营养角度看无疑是明智的 —— 也是在为自己的脖子编织绞索。这意味着投资于创造可储存的过剩的加工和包装食品（不仅仅是腌制的肉类，还有脂肪和油），这也意味着对掠夺者产生了不可抗拒的诱惑。⁵¹另一方面，橡子和坚果既没有这种风险，也没有这种诱惑。它们是 “后装” 的（back-loaded）。收获它们是一件简单和相当悠闲的事情。⁵²而且，关键是，在储存之前不需要加工。相反，大部分艰苦的工作只是在消费前才发生：浸出和研磨，以制作粥、蛋糕和饼干。（这与烟熏鱼截然相反，如果你不愿意，你甚至不需要烹饪。）

So there was little point in raiding a store of raw acorns. As a result, there was also no real incentive to develop organized ways of defending these stores against potential raiders. One can begin to see the logic here. Salmon-fishing and acorn-gathering simply have very different practical affordances, which over the long term might be expected to produce very different sorts of societies: one warlike and prone to raiding (and after you have made off with the food, it’s not much of a leap to begin carrying off prisoners as well), the other essentially peaceful.⁵³ Northwest Coast societies, then, were warlike because they simply didn’t have the option of relying on a war-proof staple food.

因此，抢夺生橡子的仓库没有什么意义。因此，也没有真正的动力去发展有组织的方式来保卫这些仓库，以抵御潜在的袭击者。人们可以开始看到这里的逻辑。捕捞鲑鱼和采集橡树果实具有非常不同的实用性，从长远来看，这可能会产生非常不同的社会类型：一个是好战的，容易遭到袭击（在你获得食物后，开始带走囚犯也不是什么大问题），另一个基本上是和平的。⁵³那么，西北海岸的社会是好战的，因为他们根本没有选择依靠防战的主食。

It’s certainly an elegant theory, quite clever and satisfying in its own way.⁵⁴ The problem is it just doesn’t seem to match up to historical reality. The first and most obvious difficulty is that the capture of dried fish, or foodstuffs of any kind, was never a significant aim of Northwest Coast inter-group raiding. To put it bluntly, there’s only so many smoked fish one can pile up in a war canoe. And carrying bulk products overland was even more difficult: pack animals being entirely absent in this part of the Americas, everything had to be carried by human beings, and on a long trip a slave is likely to eat about as much as they can carry. The main aim of raids was always to capture people, never food.⁵⁵ But this was also one of the most densely populated regions of North America. Where, then, did this hunger for people come from? These are precisely the kind of questions that ‘optimal foraging theory’ and other ‘rational-choice’ approaches seem utterly unable to answer.

这当然是一个优雅的理论，相当聪明，而且以自己的方式令人满意。⁵⁴问题是，它似乎与历史现实不相符。第一个也是最明显的困难是，捕获鱼干或任何种类的食品，从来都不是西北海岸群体间突袭的重要目的。直截了当地说，一个人在战船上能堆积的熏鱼只有那么多。而从陆路运送大宗产品则更加困难：在美洲的这一地区完全没有驮运动物，所有东西都必须由人携带，而在长途旅行中，奴隶吃的东西很可能和他们能携带的一样多。袭击的主要目的始终是为了抓人，而不是抓食物。⁵⁵但这里也是北美人口最稠密的地区之一。那么，这种对人的饥饿感从何而来？这些正是 “最佳觅食理论” 和其他 “理性选择” 方法似乎完全无法回答的问题。

In fact, the ultimate causes of slavery didn’t lie in environmental or demographic conditions, but in Northwest Coast concepts of the proper ordering of society; and these, in turn, were the result of political jockeying by different sectors of the population who, as everywhere, had somewhat different perspectives on what a proper society should be. The simple reality is that there was no shortage of working hands in Northwest Coast households. But a good proportion of those hands belonged to aristocratic title holders who felt strongly that they should be exempted from menial work. They might hunt manatees or killer whales, but it was inconceivable for them to be seen building weirs or gutting fish. First-hand accounts show this often became an issue in the spring and summer, when the only limits on fish-harvesting were the number of hands available to process and preserve the catch. Rules of decorum prevented nobles from joining in, while low-ranking commoners (‘perpetual transients’, as one ethnographer called them)⁵⁶ would instantly defect to a rival household if pressed too hard or called upon too often.

事实上，奴隶制的最终原因并不在于环境或人口条件，而在于西北海岸对社会适当秩序的概念；而这些又是不同阶层的人进行政治角逐的结果，他们在任何地方都对适当的社会应该是什么有一些不同的看法。一个简单的现实是，西北海岸的家庭并不缺乏劳动者。但这些人中有相当一部分属于贵族头衔持有者，他们强烈认为自己应该被免除琐碎的工作。他们可以猎杀海牛或虎鲸，但无法想象他们会被看到建造围堰或给鱼开膛破肚。第一手资料显示，这在春夏之交经常成为一个问题，当时对捕鱼的唯一限制是有多少人可以处理和保存渔获物。礼仪规则阻止了贵族的加入，而低级别的平民（一位民族志学者称他们为 “永久的过渡者”）则⁵⁶如果被逼得太紧或被要求的次数太多，他们会立即投奔对手的家庭。

In other words, aristocrats probably did feel that commoners should be working like slaves for them, but commoners had other opinions. Many were happy to devote long hours to art, but considered fish runs quite another matter. Indeed, the relation between title-holding nobles and their dependants seems to have been under constant negotiation. Sometimes it was not entirely clear who was serving whom:

换句话说，贵族们可能确实觉得平民应该像奴隶一样为他们工作，但平民们却有其他看法。许多人乐于为艺术献出漫长的时间，但认为养鱼是另一回事。事实上，拥有头衔的贵族和他们的家属之间的关系似乎一直在进行协商。有时并不完全清楚谁在为谁服务。

High rank was a birthright but a noble could not rest on his laurels. He had to ‘keep up’ his name through generous feasting, potlatching, and general open-handedness. Otherwise he ran the risk not only of losing face but in extreme cases actually losing his position, or even his life. Swadesh tells of a despotic [Nootka] chief who was murdered for ‘robbing’ his commoners by demanding all of his fishermen’s catch, rather than the usual tributary portion. His successor outdid himself in generosity, saying when he caught a whale, ‘You people cut it up and everyone take one chunk; just leave the little dorsal fin for me.’⁵⁷

高等级是与生俱来的权利，但一个贵族不能满足于他的荣誉。他必须通过慷慨的盛宴、锅碗瓢盆和普遍的开放性来 “保持” 他的名声。否则，他不仅会有丢脸的风险，而且在极端情况下还会失去地位，甚至是生命。Swadesh 讲述了一个专制的诺特卡酋长被谋杀的故事，他要求渔民提供所有的渔获物，而不是通常的支流部分，从而 “抢劫” 了他的平民。他的继任者比他自己更慷慨，当他捕到一条鲸鱼时说：“你们把它切开，每个人拿一大块；把小背鳍留给我。”⁵⁷

The result, from the nobles’ point of view, was a perennial shortage, not of labour as such but of controllable labour at key times of year. This was the problem to which slavery addressed itself. And such were the immediate causes, which made ‘harvesting people’ from neighbouring clans no less essential to the aboriginal economy of the Northwest Coast than constructing weirs, clam gardens or terraced root plots.⁵⁸

从贵族的角度来看，其结果是常年短缺，不是劳动力本身，而是在一年中的关键时期可控的劳动力。这就是奴隶制要解决的问题。而这些都是直接原因，这使得从邻近部族 “收割人” 对西北海岸原住民经济的重要性不亚于建造围堰、蛤蜊园或梯田根地。⁵⁸

So we must conclude that ecology does not explain the presence of slavery on the Northwest Coast. Freedom does. Title-holding aristocrats, locked in rivalry with one another, simply lacked the means to compel their own subjects to support their endless games of magnificence. They were forced to look abroad.

因此，我们必须得出结论，生态学并不能解释西北海岸存在的奴隶制。自由才是。拥有所有权的贵族，在相互竞争中被锁定，根本没有办法强迫自己的臣民支持他们无休止的华丽游戏。他们被迫将目光投向国外。

What, then, of California?

那么，加利福尼亚的情况如何？

Picking up where we left off, with the ‘tale of the Wogies’, a logical place to start is precisely the boundary zone between these two culture areas. As it turns out, the Yurok and other ‘Protestant foragers’ of northern California were, even by Californian standards, unusual, and it behoves us to understand why.

从我们离开的地方，即 “Wogies 的故事” 开始，一个合乎逻辑的地方正是这两个文化区域之间的边界地带。事实证明，加利福尼亚北部的尤洛克人和其他 “新教觅食者”，即使以加利福尼亚的标准来看，也是不寻常的，我们有责任了解原因。

IN WHICH WE TURN TO THE CULTIVATION OF DIFFERENCE IN THE PACIFIC ‘SHATTER ZONE’

其中，我们转向太平洋 “破碎区” 的差异培养

Alfred Kroeber, who pioneered the ethnographic study of California’s indigenous population, described its northwest section as a ‘shatter zone’, an area of unusual diversity, bridging the two great culture areas of the Pacific littoral. Here the distribution of ethnic and language groups – Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Tolowa, and as many as a dozen even smaller societies – compressed like the bellows of an accordion. Some of these micro-nations spoke languages of the Athabascan family; others, in their domestic arrangements and architecture, retained traces of aristocracy that point clearly to their origins somewhere up on the Northwest Coast. Still, with very few exceptions, none practised chattel slavery.⁵⁹

阿尔弗雷德·克罗伯是加州原住民民族学研究的先驱，他将加州的西北部描述为一个 “破碎区”，一个具有不寻常多样性的地区，连接着太平洋沿岸的两个大文化区。在这里，种族和语言群体的分布 —— 尤洛克（Yurok）、卡鲁克（Karuk）、胡帕（Hupa）、托洛瓦（Tolowa）以及多达十几个甚至更小的社会 —— 像手风琴的风箱一样被压缩。这些微型民族中，有的讲阿萨巴斯克语系的语言；有的则在其家庭安排和建筑中保留了贵族的痕迹，明确指出其起源于西北海岸的某个地方。不过，除了极少数例外，没有一个人实行动产奴役制。⁵⁹

To underscore the contrast, we should note that in any true Northwest Coast settlement hereditary slaves might have constituted up to a quarter of the population. These figures are striking. As we noted earlier, they rival the demographic balance in the colonial South at the height of the cotton boom and are in line with estimates for household slavery in classical Athens.⁶⁰ If so, these were full-blown ‘slave societies’ where unfree labour underpinned the domestic economy and sustained the prosperity of nobles and commoners alike. Assuming that many groups came south from the Northwest Coast, as linguistic and other evidence suggests, and that at least some of this movement took place after about 1800 BC (when slavery was most likely institutionalized), the question becomes: when and how did foragers in the ‘shatter zone’ come to lose the habit of keeping slaves?

为了强调这种对比，我们应该注意到，在任何真正的西北海岸定居点，世袭奴隶可能占到人口的四分之一。这些数字是惊人的。正如我们前面所指出的，它们可以与南方殖民地在棉花繁荣时期的人口平衡相媲美，并且与古典雅典的家庭奴隶制的估计相一致。⁶⁰如果是这样，这些都是完全的 “奴隶社会”，不自由的劳动力支撑着国内经济，维持着贵族和平民的繁荣。假设许多群体从西北海岸南下，正如语言学和其他证据所表明的那样，而且至少有一些迁移发生在大约公元前 1800 年之后（那时奴隶制最，可能已经制度化），那么问题就来了：“破碎区” 的觅食者何时以及如何失去饲养奴隶的习惯？

The ‘when’ part of this question is really a matter for future research. The ‘how’ part is more accessible. In many of these societies one can observe customs that seem explicitly designed to head off the danger of captive status becoming permanent. Consider, for example, the Yurok requirement for victors in battle to pay compensation for each life taken, at the same rate one would pay if one were guilty of murder. This seems a highly efficient way of making inter-group raiding both fiscally pointless and morally bankrupt. In monetary terms, military advantage became a liability to the winning side. As Kroeber put it, ‘The vae victis of civilization might well have been replaced among the Yurok, in a monetary sense at least, by the dictum: “Woe to the victors.”’⁶¹

这个问题的 “何时” 部分确实是未来研究的问题。而 “如何” 的部分则更容易理解。在许多这样的社会中，我们可以观察到一些习俗，这些习俗似乎是为了避免俘虏身份成为永久性的危险。例如，考虑到尤罗克人要求战斗中的胜利者为每条被夺走的生命支付赔偿金，赔偿金额与谋杀罪的赔偿金额相同。这似乎是一种非常有效的方式，使群体间的掠夺在财政上毫无意义，在道德上也破产了。在货币方面，军事优势成为胜利一方的负担。正如克罗伯所说，“至少在货币意义上，文明的胜利者在尤罗克人中很可能已经被 “胜利者有祸了” 的箴言所取代。⁶¹

The Chetcos’ cautionary tale of the Wogies offers some further pointers. It suggests that populations directly adjacent to the Californian ‘shatter zone’ were aware of their northern neighbours and saw them as warlike, and as disposed to a life of luxury based on exploiting the labour of those they subdued. It implies they recognized such exploitation as a possibility in their own societies yet rejected it, since keeping slaves would undermine important social values (they would become ‘fat and lazy’). Turning south, to the California shatter zone itself, we find evidence that, in many key areas of social life, the foragers of this region were indeed building their communities, in good schismogenetic fashion, as a kind of mirror image; a conscious inversion of those on the Northwest Coast. Some examples are in order.

切特科关于 Wogies 的警告性故事提供了一些进一步的指示。它表明，与加利福尼亚 “破碎区” 直接相邻的居民了解他们的北方邻居，并认为他们好战，而且倾向于过一种基于剥削他们所征服的人的劳动的奢侈生活。这意味着他们认识到这种剥削在他们自己的社会中是可能的，但却拒绝接受，因为保留奴隶会破坏重要的社会价值（他们会变得 ‘肥胖和懒惰’）。向南转到加利福尼亚破碎区本身，我们发现有证据表明，在社会生活的许多关键领域，这一地区的觅食者确实在以良好的分裂生成方式建立他们的社区，作为一种镜像；对西北海岸的社区进行有意识的颠覆。以下是一些例子。

Clues emerge from the simplest and most apparently pragmatic details. Let us cite just one or two. No free member of a Northwest Coast household would ever be seen chopping or carrying wood.⁶² To do so was to undermine one’s own status, effectively making oneself the equivalent of a slave. Californian chiefs, by contrast, seem to have elevated these exact same activities into a solemn public duty, incorporating them into the core rituals of the sweat lodge. As Goldschmidt observed:

线索出现在最简单和最明显的实用性细节中。让我们只举一两个例子。在西北海岸的家庭中，没有一个自由成员会被看到去砍伐或搬运木材。⁶²这样做是在破坏自己的地位，实际上使自己相当于一个奴隶。相比之下，加利福尼亚酋长似乎将这些完全相同的活动提升为庄严的公共义务，并将其纳入汗蒸房的核心仪式中。正如戈德施密特所观察到的。

All men, particularly the youths, were exhorted to gather wood for use in sweating. This was not exploitation of child labor, but an important religious act, freighted with significance. Special wood was brought from the mountain ridges; it was used for an important purification ritual. The gathering itself was a religious act, for it was a means of acquiring ‘luck.’ It had to be done with the proper psychological attitude of which restrained demeanor and constant thinking about the acquisition of riches were the chief elements. The job became a moral end rather than a means to an end, with both religious and economic involvements.⁶³

所有的人，特别是年轻人，都被劝说去收集木材用于发汗。这不是剥削童工，而是一种重要的宗教行为，具有重要意义。特殊的木材从山脊上运来；它被用于一个重要的净化仪式。采集本身就是一种宗教行为，因为它是获得 “运气” 的一种手段。它必须以适当的心理态度进行，其中克制的举止和对获得财富的不断思考是主要因素。这项工作成为一种道德目的，而不是达到目的的手段，同时涉及宗教和经济问题。⁶³

Similarly, the ritual sweating that ensued – by purging the Californian male’s body of surplus fluid – inverts the excessive consumption of fat, blubber and grease that signified masculine status on the Northwest Coast. To enhance his status and impress his ancestors, the nobleman of the Northwest Coast ladled candlefish oil into the fire at the tournament fields of the potlatch; the Californian chief, by contrast, burned calories in the closed seclusion of his sweat lodge.

同样，随之而来的仪式性出汗 —— 通过清除加利福尼亚男性体内多余的液体 —— 颠倒了在西北海岸象征男性地位的脂肪、鲸脂和油脂的过度消耗。为了提高自己的地位，给祖先留下好印象，西北海岸的贵族在锅庄的比赛场上把烛鱼油舀进火里；相比之下，加利福尼亚的酋长在他的汗屋里封闭的隐蔽处燃烧卡路里。

Native Californians seem to have been well aware of the kinds of values they were rejecting. They even institutionalized them in the figure of the clown,⁶⁴ whose public antics of sloth, gluttony and megalomania – while offering a platform from which to sound off about local problems and discontents – also seem to parody the most coveted values of a proximate civilization. Further inversions occur in the domains of spiritual and aesthetic life. Artistic traditions of the Northwest Coast are all about spectacle and deception: the theatrical trickery of masks that flicker open and shut, of surface figures pulling the gaze in sharply opposed directions. The native word for ‘ritual’ in most Northwest Coast languages actually translates as ‘fraud’ or ‘illusion’.⁶⁵ Californian spirituality provides an almost perfect antithesis. What mattered was cultivation of the inner self through discipline, earnest training, and hard work. Californian art entirely avoids the use of masks.

加州土著人似乎很清楚他们所拒绝的是哪种价值观。他们甚至通过小丑的形象将其制度化。⁶⁴他的懒惰、贪食和自大的公共滑稽行为 —— 虽然提供了一个平台，让人们对当地的问题和不满发出声音 —— 也似乎在模仿一个近代文明最令人羡慕的价值。进一步的反转发生在精神和审美生活的领域。西北海岸的艺术传统都是关于奇观和欺骗的：面具的戏剧性诡计，忽开忽关，表面人物将目光拉向截然相反的方向。在大多数西北海岸的语言中，“仪式” 的土语实际上被翻译为 “欺诈” 或 “幻觉”。⁶⁵加利福尼亚的精神信仰提供了一个几乎完美的对立面。重要的是通过纪律、认真的训练和努力工作来培养内在的自我。加州艺术完全避免了使用面具。

Moreover, Californian songs and poetry show that disciplined training and work were ways of connecting with what is authentic in life. So, while Northwest Coast groups were not averse to adopting Europeans in lavish naming ceremonies, would-be Californians – like Robert Frank, adopted by the Yurok in the late nineteenth century – were more likely to find themselves hauling wood from the mountains, weeping with each footfall, as they earned their place among the ‘real people’.⁶⁶

此外，加利福尼亚的歌曲和诗歌表明，有纪律的训练和工作是与生活中的真实事物相联系的方式。因此，虽然西北海岸的群体并不排斥在奢华的命名仪式中收养欧洲人，但未来的加利福尼亚人 —— 如 19 世纪末被尤罗克人收养的罗伯特·弗兰克 —— 更有可能发现自己从山上拖运木材，每一次落脚都在哭泣，因为他们在 “真正的人” 中赢得了地位。⁶⁶

If we accept that what we call ‘society’ refers to the mutual creation of human beings, and that ‘value’ refers to the most conscious aspects of that process, then it really is hard to see the Northwest Coast and California as anything but opposites. People in both regions engaged in extravagant expenditures of labour, but the forms and functions of that labour could not have differed more. In the Northwest Coast, the exuberant multiplication of furniture, crests, poles, masks, mantles and boxes was consistent with the extravagance and theatricality of potlatch. The ultimate purpose of all this work and ritual creativity, however, was to ‘fasten on’ names and titles to aristocratic contenders – to fashion specific sorts of persons. The result, among other things, is that Northwest Coast artistic traditions are still widely considered among the most dazzling the world has ever seen; immediately recognizable for their strong focus on the theme of exteriority – a world of masks, illusions and façades.⁶⁷

如果我们接受我们所称的 “社会” 是指人类的相互创造，而 “价值” 是指这一过程中最有意识的方面，那么，我们确实很难把西北海岸和加利福尼亚看作是相反的东西。这两个地区的人们都从事着奢侈的劳动支出，但这种劳动的形式和功能却没有什么不同。在西北海岸，家具、徽章、柱子、面具、斗篷和盒子的大量增加与锅庄的奢侈和戏剧性是一致的。然而，所有这些工作和仪式创意的最终目的是为贵族竞争者 “贴上” 名字和头衔 —— 塑造特定类型的人。其结果是，除其他外，西北海岸的艺术传统仍然被广泛认为是世界上有史以来最令人眼花缭乱的艺术之一；它们因强烈关注外表的主题而被立即识别出来 —— 一个由面具、幻觉和门面组成的世界。⁶⁷

Societies in the Californian shatter zone were equally extravagant in their own way. But if they were ‘potlatch ing’ anything, then surely it was labour itself. As one ethnographer wrote of another Yurok neighbour, the Atsugewi: ‘The ideal individual was both wealthy and industrious. In the first grey haze of dawn he arose to begin his day’s work, never ceasing activity until late at night. Early rising and the ability to go without sleep were great virtues. It was extremely complimentary to say “he doesn’t know how to sleep.”’⁶⁸ Wealthy men – and it should be noted that all these societies were decidedly patriarchal – were typically seen as providers for poorer dependants, improvident folk and foolish drifters, by virtue of their own self-discipline and labour and that of their wives.

加利福尼亚州破碎区的社会以自己的方式同样奢侈。但是，如果他们是在 “偷窃” 什么，那么肯定是劳动本身。正如一位民族学家在谈到另一个尤罗克人的邻居阿苏格维人时写道：“理想的个人是既富有又勤劳的。在黎明的第一道灰霾中，他起身开始一天的工作，直到深夜都没有停止活动。早起和不睡觉的能力是伟大的美德。说 “他不知道如何睡觉” 是极为恭维的。⁶⁸富有的男人 —— 应该指出的是，所有这些社会都是明显的父权制 —— 通常被视为贫穷的受抚养人、不自量力的人和愚蠢的漂泊者的供养者，凭借的是他们自己的自律和劳动以及他们妻子的努力。

With its ‘Protestant’ emphasis on interiority and introspection, Californian spirituality offers a perfect counterpoint to the smoke and mirrors of Northwest Coast ceremonials. Among the Yurok, work properly performed became a way of connecting with a true reality, of which prized objects like dentalia and hummingbird scalps were mere outward manifestations. A contemporary ethnographer explains:

由于其 “新教” 强调内在性和内省，加利福尼亚的精神信仰为西北海岸仪式的烟雾和镜面提供了一个完美的对立面。在尤罗克人中，适当的工作成为与真正的现实相联系的一种方式，而像牙签和蜂鸟头皮这样的珍贵物品只是其外在表现形式。一位当代民族志学者解释说。

As he ‘accumulates’ himself and becomes cleaner, the person in training sees himself as more and more ‘real’ and thus the world as more and more ‘beautiful’: a real place in experience rather than merely a setting for a ‘story,’ for intellectual knowledge … In 1865, Captain Spott, for instance, trained for many weeks as he helped the medicine man prepare for the First Salmon ceremony at the mouth of the Klamath River … ‘the old [medicine] man sent him to bring down sweathouse wood. On the way he cried with nearly every step because now he was seeing with his own eyes how it was done.’ … Tears, crying, are of crucial importance in Yurok spiritual training as manifestations of personal yearning, sincerity, humility, and openness.⁶⁹

随着他 “积累” 自己并变得更干净，接受训练的人认为自己越来越 “真实”，因此世界也越来越 “美丽”：在经验中是一个真实的地方，而不仅仅是一个 “故事” 和知识的背景 …… 例如，1865 年，斯波特船长在帮助药师准备在克拉玛斯河口举行的第一条鲑鱼仪式时，进行了许多周的训练…… “老药师让他去把汗屋的木头拿下来。在路上，他几乎每走一步就哭一次，因为现在他亲眼看到这一切是如何完成的…… 泪水、哭泣在尤罗克人的精神训练中至关重要，是个人渴望、真诚、谦逊和开放的表现。⁶⁹

Through such exertions one discovered one’s true vocation and purpose; and when ‘someone else’s purpose in life is to interfere with you,’ the same ethnographer was told, ‘he must be stopped, lest you become his slave, his “pet”.’

通过这样的努力，人们发现了自己真正的天职和目的；而当 “别人的生活目的是干扰你”，同一位民族学者被告知，“必须阻止他，以免你成为他的奴隶，他的 ‘宠物’。”

The Yurok, with their puritanical manners and extraordinary cultural emphasis on work and money, might seem an odd choice to celebrate as anti-slavery heroes (though many Calvinist Abolitionists were not so very different). But of course we’re not introducing them as heroes, any more than we wish to represent their Northwest Coast neighbours as the villains of the piece. We are introducing them as a way to illustrate how the process by which cultures define themselves against one another is always, at root, political, since it involves self-conscious arguments about the proper way to live. Revealingly, the arguments appear to have been most intense precisely in this border zone between anthropological ‘culture areas’.

尤罗克人，以其清教徒的礼仪和对工作和金钱的非凡文化强调，作为反奴隶制的英雄来庆祝似乎是一个奇怪的选择（尽管许多加尔文教派的废奴主义者并不那么与众不同）。但是，我们当然不是把他们作为英雄来介绍，就像我们希望把他们的西北海岸邻居作为作品中的恶棍一样。我们介绍他们是为了说明各种文化相互定义的过程从根本上说总是政治性的，因为它涉及到关于正确生活方式的自我意识的争论。令人惊讶的是，这些争论似乎正是在人类学 “文化区” 之间的边界地带最为激烈。

As we mentioned, the Yurok and their immediate neighbours were somewhat unusual, even by Californian standards. Yet they are unusual in contradictory ways. On the one hand, they actually did hold slaves, if few in number. Almost all the peoples of central and southern California, the Maidu, Wintu, Pomo and so on, rejected the institution entirely.⁷⁰ There appear to have been at least two reasons for this. First, almost everywhere except in the northwest, a man or woman’s money and other wealth was ritually burned at death – and as a result, the institution served as an effective levelling mechanism.⁷¹ The Yurok-Karuk-Hupa area was one of the few places where dentalium could actually be inherited. Combine this with the fact that quarrels did lead to war much more frequently here than anywhere else, and you have a kind of shrunken, diminished version of the Northwest Coast ranking system, in this case a tripartite division between wealthy families, ordinary Yurok and paupers.⁷²

正如我们所提到的，尤罗克人和他们的近邻有些不寻常，即使以加利福尼亚的标准来看也是如此。然而，他们的不寻常之处是相互矛盾的。一方面，他们实际上确实持有奴隶，尽管数量很少。几乎所有加州中部和南部的民族，如梅杜族、温图族、波莫族等，都完全拒绝这种制度。⁷⁰这似乎至少有两个原因。首先，除西北部外，几乎所有地方的男人或女人的金钱和其他财富在死亡时都会被仪式性地烧掉 —— 因此，该制度成为一种有效的平准机制。⁷¹尤罗克·卡鲁克·胡帕地区是为数不多的可以真正继承牙膏的地方之一。结合这一事实，争吵导致的战争在这里比其他任何地方都要频繁，你就有了一种缩小的、减弱的西北海岸等级制度，在这种情况下，富裕家庭、普通尤鲁克人和贫民之间有一个三方的分割。⁷²

Captives were not slaves, all sources insist they were redeemed quickly, and all killers had to pay compensation; but all this required money. This meant the important men who often instigated wars could profit handsomely from the affair by lending to those unable to pay, and the latter were thus either reduced to debt peons, or retreated to live ignominiously in isolated homesteads in the woods.⁷³ One might see the intense focus on obtaining money, and resultant puritanism, and also the strong moral opposition to slave-raiding as a result of tensions created by living in this unstable and chaotic buffer zone between the two regions. Elsewhere in California, formal chiefs or headmen existed, and though they wielded no power of compulsion they settled conflicts by raising funds for compensation collectively, and the focus of cultural life was less on the accumulation of property than on organizing annual rites of world renewal.

俘虏不是奴隶，所有的资料都坚持认为他们很快就会被赎回，所有的杀人者都必须支付赔偿金；但这一切都需要钱。这意味着那些经常挑起战争的重要人物可以通过贷款给那些无力支付的人而从中获得丰厚的利润，而后者则因此而沦为负债累累的农民，或者退而求其次，在树林中孤立的家园里过着无耻的生活。⁷³人们可能会看到对获得金钱的强烈关注，以及由此产生的清教主义，还有对掠夺奴隶的强烈道德反对，这都是生活在两个地区之间的这个不稳定和混乱的缓冲区所产生的紧张关系的结果。在加利福尼亚的其他地方，存在着正式的酋长或头人，虽然他们没有强制力，但他们通过集体筹集赔偿资金来解决冲突，而且文化生活的重点不在于财产的积累，而在于组织每年的世界复兴仪式。

Here one might say things have turned full circle. The ostensible purpose of the potlatch and spectacular competitions over wealth and heirloom titles on the Northwest Coast was, ultimately, to win prized roles in the great midwinter masquerades that were, similarly, intended to revive the forces of nature. California chiefs too were ultimately concerned with winter masquerades – being Californians, they did not employ literal masks, but, as in the Kwakiutl midwinter ceremonial, gods came down to earth and were embodied in costumed dancers – designed to regenerate the world and save it from imminent destruction. The difference, of course, was that in the absence of a servile labour force or any system of hereditary titles, Californian Pomo or Maidu chiefs had to go about organizing such rituals in an entirely different way.

在这里，人们可以说事情已经转了一圈。西北海岸的锅庄和关于财富和传家宝头衔的壮观竞赛的表面目的，最终是为了在伟大的隆冬化装舞会中赢得珍贵的角色，同样，隆冬化装舞会的目的是恢复自然的力量。加利福尼亚州的酋长们最终也关注冬季化装舞会 —— 作为加利福尼亚人，他们没有使用字面上的面具，但是，就像在 Kwakiutl 的隆冬仪式中一样，神灵下凡，体现在盛装的舞者身上 —— 旨在使世界再生，使其免遭即将到来的毁灭。当然，不同的是，在没有奴役性劳动力或任何世袭头衔制度的情况下，加利福尼亚波莫或梅杜酋长不得不以完全不同的方式来组织这种仪式。

SOME CONCLUSIONS

一些结论

Environmental determinists have an unfortunate tendency to treat humans as little more than automata, living out some economist’s fantasy of rational calculation. To be fair, they don’t deny that human beings are quirky and imaginative creatures – they just seem to reason that, in the long run, this fact makes very little difference. Those who don’t follow an optimal pathway for the use of resources are destined for the ash heap of history. Anthropologists who object to this kind of determinism will typically appeal to culture, but ultimately this comes down to little more than insisting that explanation is impossible: English people act the way they do because they are English, Yurok act the way they do because they’re Yurok; why they are English or Yurok is not really ours to say. Humans – from this other perspective, which is just as extreme in its own way – are at best an arbitrary constellation of cultural elements, perhaps assembled according to some prevailing spirit, code or ethos, and which society ends up with which ethos is treated as beyond explanation, little more than a random roll of the dice.

环境决定论者有一种不幸的倾向，他们把人类当作不过是自动装置，活在一些经济学家的理性计算的幻想中。公平地说，他们并不否认人类，是古怪和富有想象力的生物 —— 他们只是似乎认为，从长远来看，这一事实没有什么区别。那些不遵循资源利用的最佳途径的人注定要被历史的灰堆所淘汰。反对这种决定论的人类学家通常会呼吁文化，但最终这只不过是坚持认为解释是不可能的。英国人的行为方式是因为他们是英国人，尤罗克人的行为方式是因为他们是尤罗克人；他们为什么是英国人或尤罗克人，其实不是我们可以说的。人类 —— 从这个另一个角度来看，也是同样极端的 —— 充其量是一个任意的文化元素组合，也许是根据某种普遍的精神、准则或精神气质组合起来的，哪个社会最终拥有哪种精神气质被视为无法解释，只是随机掷骰子而已。

Putting matters in such stark terms does not mean there is no truth to either position. The intersection of environment and technology does make a difference, often a huge difference, and to some degree, cultural difference really is just an arbitrary roll of the dice: there’s no ‘explanation’ for why Chinese is a tonal language and Finnish an agglutinative one; that’s just the way things happened to turn out. Still, if one treats the arbitrariness of linguistic difference as the foundation of all social theory – which is basically what structuralism did, and post-structuralism continues to do – the result is just as mechanically deterministic as the most extreme form of environmental determination. ‘Language speaks us.’ We are doomed to endlessly enact patterns of behaviour not of our own creation; not of anyone’s creation really, until some seismic shift in the cultural equivalent of tectonic plates lands us somehow in a new, equally inexplicable arrangement.

把事情说得如此尖锐并不意味着两种立场都没有真理。环境和技术的交叉作用确实产生了差异，而且往往是巨大的差异，在某种程度上，文化差异确实只是一种任意的掷骰子行为：没有任何 “解释” 为什么汉语是一种声调语言，而芬兰语是一种凝集语言；这只是事情发生的方式。但是，如果我们把语言差异的任意性当作所有社会理论的基础 —— 这基本上是结构主义所做的，后结构主义也继续这样做 —— 其结果就像最极端的环境决定形式一样是机械的决定论。'语言说出了我们。我们注定要无休止地制定不是我们自己创造的行为模式；其实也不是任何人创造的，直到相当于构造板块的文化的一些地震性转变，使我们以某种方式进入一个新的、同样无法解释的安排。

In other words, both approaches presume that we are already, effectively, stuck. This is why we ourselves place so much emphasis on the notion of self-determination. Just as it is reasonable to assume that Pleistocene mammoth hunters, moving back and forth between different seasonal forms of organization, must have developed a degree of political self-consciousness – to have thought about the relative merits of different ways of living with one another – so too the intricate webs of cultural difference that came to characterize human societies after the end of the last Ice Age must surely have involved a degree of political introspection. Once again, our intention is simply to treat those who created these forms of culture as intelligent adults, capable of reflecting on the social worlds they were building or rejecting.

换句话说，这两种方法都假定我们已经，有效地，被困住了。这就是为什么我们自己如此强调自我决定的概念。正如我们有理由认为，更新世的猛犸象猎人在不同的季节性组织形式之间来回穿梭，一定会发展出一定程度的政治自我意识 —— 思考不同的生活方式对彼此的相对好处 —— 同样，在上个冰河时代结束后，错综复杂的文化差异网络成为人类社会的特征，这肯定涉及一定程度的政治反省。再一次，我们的目的只是把那些创造这些文化形式的人当作聪明的成年人，能够反思他们正在建立或拒绝的社会世界。

Obviously, this approach, like any other, can be taken to ridiculous extremes. Returning momentarily to Weber’s Protestant Ethic, it is popular in certain circles to claim that ‘nations make choices’, that some have chosen to be Protestant and others Catholic, and that this is the main reason so many people in the United States or Germany are rich, and so many in Brazil or Italy are poor. This makes about as much sense as arguing that since everyone is free to make their own decisions, the fact that some people end up as financial consultants and others as security guards is entirely their own doing (indeed, it’s usually the same sort of people who make both sorts of argument). Perhaps Marx put it best: we make our own history, but not under conditions of our own choosing.

很明显，这种方法和其他方法一样，可以走到荒谬的极端。回到韦伯的新教伦理，在某些圈子里很流行的说法是 “国家做出了选择”，有些人选择了新教，有些人选择了天主教，这就是美洲或德国有这么多人富有，而巴西或意大利有这么多人贫穷的主要原因。这就像认为既然每个人都可以自由地做出自己的决定，那么有些人最终成为财务顾问，有些人成为保安，这完全是他们自己造成的一样有意义（事实上，通常是同一类人提出这两种论点）。也许马克思说得最好：我们创造自己的历史，但不是在我们自己选择的条件下。

In fact, one reason social theorists will always be debating this issue is that we can’t really know how much difference ‘human agency’ – the preferred term, currently, for what used to be called ‘free will’ – really makes. Historical events by definition happen only once, and there’s no real way to know if they ‘might’ have turned out otherwise (might Spain have never conquered Mexico? Could the steam engine have been invented in Ptolemaic Egypt, leading to an ancient industrial revolution?), or what the point of asking is even supposed to be. It seems part of the human condition that while we cannot predict future events, as soon as those events do happen we find it hard to see them as anything but inevitable. There’s no way to know. So precisely where one wishes to set the dial between freedom and determinism is largely a matter of taste.

事实上，社会理论家总是在争论这个问题的一个原因是，我们无法真正知道 “人类机构” —— 目前被称为 “自由意志” 的首选术语 —— 到底有多大区别。根据定义，历史事件只发生过一次，而且没有真正的办法知道它们是否 “可能” 会出现其他结果（西班牙是否从未征服过墨西哥？蒸汽机会不会在托勒密时代的埃及被发明，从而导致古代的工业革命呢？这似乎是人类状况的一部分，虽然我们无法预测未来的事件，但一旦这些事件真的发生，我们就很难把它们看作是不可避免的事情。没有办法知道。因此，一个人希望在自由和决定论之间设定的确切位置主要是一个品味问题。

Since this book is mainly about freedom, it seems appropriate to set the dial a bit further to the left than usual, and to explore the possibility that human beings have more collective say over their own destiny than we ordinarily assume. Rather than defining the indigenous inhabitants of the Pacific Coast of North America as ‘incipient’ farmers or as examples of ‘emerging’ complexity – which is really just an updated way of saying they were all ‘rushing headlong for their chains’ – we have explored the possibility that they might have been proceeding with (more or less) open eyes, and found plenty of evidence to support it.

由于这本书主要是关于自由的，所以似乎应该把表盘设置得比平时更左一点，并探讨人类对自己的命运拥有比我们通常假设的更多集体发言权的可能性。我们没有将北美洲太平洋沿岸的原住民定义为 “初生” 的农民或 “新兴” 的复杂性的例子 —— 这实际上只是一种最新的说法，即他们都是 “一头冲向他们的 ” —— 我们探讨了他们可能是以（或多或少）开放的眼光行事的可能性，并找到了大量的证据来支持它。

Slavery, we’ve argued, became commonplace on the Northwest Coast largely because an ambitious aristocracy found itself unable to reduce its free subjects to a dependable workforce. The ensuing violence seems to have spread until those in what we’ve been calling the ‘shatter zone’ of northern California gradually found themselves obliged to create institutions capable of insulating them from it, or at least its worst extremes. A schismogenetic process ensued, whereby coastal peoples came to define themselves increasingly against each other. This was by no means just an argument about slavery; it appears to have affected everything from the configuration of households, law, ritual and art to conceptions of what it meant to be an admirable human being, and was most evident in contrasting attitudes to work, food and material wealth.⁷⁴

我们认为，奴隶制在西北海岸变得普遍，主要是因为一个雄心勃勃的贵族发现自己无法将其自由臣民变成可靠的劳动力。随之而来的暴力似乎一直在蔓延，直到我们称之为 “破碎区” 的北加州的人们逐渐发现自己不得不建立能够使他们免受暴力影响的机构，或者至少是其最极端的情况。随之而来的是一个分裂的过程，沿海地区的人们越来越多地将自己定义为彼此的对手。这绝不仅仅是关于奴隶制的争论；它似乎影响了从家庭配置、法律、仪式和艺术到对成为一个令人钦佩的人的概念的一切，并且在对工作、食物和物质财富的态度对比中最为明显。⁷⁴

All this played a crucial role in shaping what outsiders came to see as the predominant sensibility of each resulting ‘culture area’ – the flamboyant extravagance of one, the austere simplicity of the other. But it also resulted in the overwhelming rejection of the practice of slavery, and the class system it entailed, throughout every part of California except for its northwesternmost corner; and even there it remained sharply limited.

所有这一切在塑造外人眼中的每个 “文化区” 的主要感觉方面发挥了关键作用 —— 一个是浮华的奢侈，另一个是朴素的简单。但是，这也导致了在加州的每一个地方，除了最西北的一角之外，绝大多数人都拒绝奴隶制的做法，以及它所带来的阶级制度；即使在那里，奴隶制仍然受到严格的限制。

What does this tell us about the emergence of similar forms of domination in earlier phases of human history? Nothing for certain, of course. It is difficult to know for sure whether Mesolithic societies of the Baltic or Breton coast that remind us, superficially, of indigenous societies on the Northwest Coast of Canada were, in fact, organized on similar principles. ‘Complexity’ – as reflected in the co-ordination of labour or elaborate ritual systems – need not mean domination. But it seems likely that similar arrangements were, indeed, emerging in some parts of the world, in some times and places, and that when they did they did not go uncontested. Regional processes of cultural differentiation, of the kind one begins to see more evidence for after the end of the last Ice Age, were probably every bit as political as those of later ages, including the ones we have considered in this chapter.

这告诉我们，在人类历史的早期阶段，类似形式的统治出现了什么？当然，没有什么是确定的。我们很难确定波罗的海或布列塔尼海岸的中石器时代社会是否在表面上让我们想起了加拿大西北海岸的土著社会，事实上，这些社会是按照类似的原则组织的。“复杂性” —— 反映在劳动的协调或复杂的仪式系统中 —— 不一定意味着统治。但是，在世界的某些地方，在某些时间和地点，似乎确实出现了类似的安排，而且，当它们出现时，并不是没有争议的。在上个冰河时代结束后，人们开始看到更多的证据，这种文化分化的区域过程可能与后来的时代一样具有政治性，包括我们在本章中考虑的那些时代。

Second, we can now see more clearly that domination begins at home. The fact that these arrangements became subjects of political contestation does not mean they were political in origin. Slavery finds its origins in war. But everywhere we encounter it slavery is also, at first, a domestic institution. Hierarchy and property may derive from notions of the sacred, but the most brutal forms of exploitation have their origins in the most intimate of social relations: as perversions of nurture, love and caring. Certainly, those origins are not to be found in government. Northwest Coast societies lacked anything that could be remotely described as an overarching polity; the closest they came were the organizing committees of annual masquerades. Instead, one finds an endless succession of great wooden houses, tiny courts each centring on a title-holding family, the commoners attached to them, and their personal slaves. Even the rank system referred to divisions within the household. It seems very likely this was true in non-agricultural societies elsewhere as well.

第二，我们现在可以更清楚地看到，支配开始于家。这些安排成为政治争论的主题这一事实并不意味着它们是政治性的起源。奴隶制在战争中找到它的起源。但在我们遇到的任何地方，奴隶制起初也是一种家庭制度。等级制度和财产可能来自神圣的概念，但最残酷的剥削形式起源于最亲密的社会关系：作为养育、爱和关怀的变态。当然，这些起源在政府中是找不到的。西北海岸的社会缺乏任何可以远程描述为总体政体的东西；最接近的是年度化装舞会的组织委员会。相反，人们发现无休止的大木屋、小法庭，每个法庭都以一个拥有所有权的家族、附属于他们的平民和他们的私人奴隶为中心。即使是等级制度也是指家庭内部的划分。在其他地方的非农业社会中，似乎也很可能是这样。

Finally, all this suggests that, historically speaking, hierarchy and equality tend to emerge together, as complements to one another. Tlingit or Haida commoners on the Northwest Coast were effectively equals in that they were all equally excluded from the ranks of title holders and therefore, in comparison to the aristocrats – with their unique identities – formed a kind of undifferentiated mass. Insofar as Californian societies rejected that entire arrangement, they could be described as self-consciously egalitarian, but in a quite different sense. Odd as it may seem, this comes through most clearly in their enthusiastic embrace of money, and again comparisons with their northern neighbours are instructive. For Northwest Coast societies, wealth, which was sacred in every sense of the term, consisted above all of heirloom treasures, whose value was based on the fact that each was unique and there was nothing in the world like it. Equality between title holders was simply inconceivable, much though they might have argued about who ultimately outranked whom. In California, the most important forms of wealth consisted of currencies whose value lay in the degree to which each string of dentalium or band of woodpecker scalps was exactly the same, and could therefore be counted – and, generally speaking, such wealth was not inherited but destroyed on the owner’s death.

最后，所有这些都表明，从历史上看，等级制度和平等往往是一起出现的，是相互补充的。西北海岸的 Tlingit 或 Haida 平民实际上是平等的，因为他们都被平等地排除在所有权人的行列之外，因此，与贵族相比 —— 他们有独特的身份 —— 形成了一种无差别的群体。只要加利福尼亚社会拒绝整个安排，他们就可以被描述为自觉的平等主义，但在一个完全不同的意义上。虽然看起来很奇怪，但这一点在他们对金钱的热情拥抱中体现得淋漓尽致，而且与北方邻居的比较也很有启发。对西北海岸社会来说，财富在任何意义上都是神圣的，它首先由传家宝组成，其价值是基于这样一个事实，即每个人都是独一无二的，世界上没有任何东西与之相似。产权持有人之间的平等是根本无法想象的，尽管他们可能会争论谁的地位最终高于谁。在加利福尼亚，最重要的财富形式包括货币，其价值在于每一串牙签或啄木鸟头皮都是完全相同的，因此可以被计算在内 —— 而且，一般来说，这种财富不是继承的，而是在主人死后被销毁。

As our story continues, we will encounter this dynamic repeatedly. We might refer to it, perhaps, as ‘inequality from below’. Domination first appears on the most intimate, domestic level. Self-consciously egalitarian politics emerge to prevent such relations from extending beyond those small worlds into the public sphere (which often comes to be imagined, in the process, as an exclusive sphere for adult men). These are the kind of dynamics that culminated in phenomena like ancient Athenian democracy. But their roots probably extend much further back in time, to well before the advent of farming and agricultural societies.

PLATONIC PREJUDICES, AND HOW THEY CLOUD OUR IDEAS ABOUT THE INVENTION OF FARMING

柏拉图式的偏见，以及它们如何影响我们对农业发明的想法

‘Tell me this,’ writes Plato:

“告诉我这个”，柏拉图写道：

Would a serious and intelligent farmer, with seeds he cared about and wished to grow to fruition, sow them in summer in the gardens of Adonis and rejoice as he watched them become beautiful in a matter of eight days; or if he did it at all, would he do this for fun and festivity? For things he really was serious about, would he not use his farmer’s craft, plant them in a suitable environment, and be content if everything he planted came to maturity in the eighth month?¹

一个严肃而聪明的农夫，拿着他关心并希望成长为果实的种子，会不会在夏天把它们播种在阿多尼斯的花园里，看着它们在八天内变得美丽而感到高兴；或者，如果他这样做，他会不会是为了好玩和庆祝而这样做？对于他真正认真对待的事情，他难道不会用他农民的手艺，把它们种在一个合适的环境中，如果他种下的东西在第八个月就成熟了，他就满足了？¹

The gardens of Adonis, to which Plato is referring here, were a sort of festive speed farming which produced no food. For the philosopher, they offered a convenient simile for all things precocious, alluring, but ultimately sterile. In the dog days of summer, when nothing can grow, the women of ancient Athens fashioned these little gardens in baskets and pots. Each held a mix of quick-sprouting grain and herbs. The makeshift seedbeds were carried up ladders on to the flat roofs of private houses and left to wilt in the sun: a botanical re-enactment of the premature death of Adonis, the fallen hunter, slain in his prime by a wild boar. Then, beyond the public gaze of men and civic authority, began the rooftop rites. Open to women from all classes of Athenian society, including prostitutes, these were rites of grieving but also wanton drunkenness, and no doubt other forms of ecstatic behaviour as well.

柏拉图在这里提到的阿多尼斯的花园，是一种不生产食物的节日性快速农业。对这位哲学家来说，它们为所有早熟、诱人但最终不育的事物提供了一个方便的比喻。在夏天的狗日里，当什么都不能生长的时候，古雅典的妇女们用篮子和盆子打造了这些小花园。每个花园里都有快速出芽的谷物和草药的混合物。这些临时的苗床被从梯子上抬到私人房屋的平顶上，让它们在阳光下枯萎：这是阿多尼斯过早死亡的植物学重演，他是一个堕落的猎人，在他年轻的时候被野猪杀死。然后，在男人和市政当局的公众视线之外，开始了屋顶仪式。这些仪式向雅典社会各阶层的妇女开放，包括妓女，这些仪式是悲伤的，但也是肆意醉酒的，无疑也是其他形式的狂喜行为。

Historians agree that the roots of this women’s cult lie in Mesopotamian fertility rites of Dumuzi/Tammuz, the shepherd-god and personification of plant life, mourned on his death each summer. Most likely the worship of Adonis, his ancient Greek incarnation, spread westwards to Greece from Phoenicia in the wake of Assyrian expansion, in the seventh century BC . Nowadays, some scholars see the whole thing as a riotous subversion of patriarchal values: an antithesis to the staid and proper state-sponsored Thesmophoria (the autumn festival of the Greek fertility goddess, Demeter), celebrated by the wives of Athenian citizens and dedicated to the serious farming on which the life of the city depended. Others read the story of Adonis the other way round, as a requiem for the primeval drama of serious hunting, cast into shadow by the advent of agriculture, but not forgotten – an echo of lost masculinity.²

历史学家们一致认为，这种妇女崇拜的根源在于美索不达米亚的杜穆兹（Dumuzi/Tammuz）生育仪式，杜穆兹是牧神和植物生命的化身，每年夏天对他的死亡表示哀悼。最有可能的是对阿多尼斯的崇拜，他在古希腊的化身，在公元前七世纪亚述扩张之后从腓尼基向西传播到希腊。如今，一些学者认为整个事件是对父权制价值观的狂热颠覆：与国家支持的呆板和适当的 Thesmophoria（希腊生育女神德墨忒尔的秋季节日）相对立，后者由雅典公民的妻子们庆祝，并致力于城市生活所依赖的认真耕作。还有人从另一个角度来解读阿多尼斯的故事，认为它是对严肃狩猎的原始戏剧的安魂曲，由于农业的出现而陷入阴影，但并没有被遗忘 —— 这是失去的男性气质的回声。²

All well and good, you may say, but what does any of this have to do with the origins of farming? What have the gardens of Adonis got to do with the first Neolithic stirrings of agriculture some 8,000 years before Plato? Well, in a sense, everything. Because these scholarly debates encapsulate just the sort of problems that surround any modern investigation of this crucial topic. Was farming from the very beginning about the serious business of producing more food to supply growing populations? Most scholars assume, as a matter of course, that this had to be the principal reason for its invention. But maybe farming began as a more playful or even subversive kind of process – or perhaps even as a side effect of other concerns, such as the desire to spend longer in particular kinds of locations, where hunting and trading were the real priorities. Which of these two ideas really embodies the spirit of the first agriculturalists; is it the stately and pragmatic Thesmophoria, or the playful and self-indulgent gardens of Adonis?

你可能会说，这一切都很好，但这与农业的起源有什么关系？阿多尼斯的花园与柏拉图之前约 8000 年的新石器时代的第一次农业骚动有什么关系？嗯，从某种意义上说，一切都有关系。因为这些学术争论恰恰概括了围绕这一关键话题的任何现代调查的问题。耕作从一开始就是为了生产更多的食物来供应不断增长的人口而进行的严肃工作吗？大多数学者理所当然地认为，这必须是其发明的主要原因。但是，也许耕作开始时是一种更有趣的，甚至是颠覆性的过程 —— 或者甚至可能是其他问题的副作用，比如在特定类型的地方呆得更久的愿望，在那里狩猎和贸易是真正的优先事项。这两种想法中哪一种真正体现了第一批农业主义者的精神；是庄重而务实的 Thesmophoria，还是俏皮而自我放纵的阿多尼斯的花园？

No doubt the peoples of the Neolithic – the world’s first farmers – themselves spent a good deal of time debating similar questions. To get a sense of why we say this, let’s consider what is probably the most famous Neolithic site in the world, Çatalhöyük.

毫无疑问，新石器时代的人们 —— 世界上最早的农民 —— 自己也花了大量的时间来辩论类似的问题。为了了解我们为什么这样说，让我们考虑一下可能是世界上最著名的新石器时代遗址，恰塔霍裕克。

IN WHICH WE DISCUSS HOW ÇATALHÖYÜK, THE WORLD’S OLDEST TOWN, GOT A NEW HISTORY

其中我们讨论了世界上最古老的城镇ç恰塔霍裕克是如何获得新的历史。

Located on the Konya Plain of central Turkey, Çatalhöyük was first settled around 7400 BC, and continued to be populated for some 1,500 years (for the purposes of mental calibration, roughly the same period of time that separates us from Amalafrida, Queen of the Vandals, who reached the height of her influence around AD 523). The site’s renown derives partly from its surprising scale. At thirteen hectares, it was more town than village, with a population of some 5,000. Yet it was a town with no apparent centre or communal facilities, or even streets: just a dense agglomeration of one household after another, all of similar sizes and layout, each accessed by ladder from the roof.

恰塔霍裕克位于土耳其中部的科尼亚平原，大约在公元前 7400 年首次有人定居，并持续居住了约 1500 年（为便于心理校准，与我们与汪达尔人的女王阿马拉弗里达相隔的时间大致相同，后者在公元 523 年左右达到了其影响力的顶点）。该遗址的名声部分来自于其惊人的规模。它占地 13 公顷，与其说是村庄，不如说是城镇，人口约 5000 人。然而，这是一个没有明显的中心或公共设施，甚至没有街道的城镇：只是一个又一个密集的住户聚集在一起，所有的大小和布局都差不多，每个人都可以从屋顶上用梯子进入。

If the overall plan of Çatalhöyük suggests an ethos of dreary uniformity, a maze of identical mud walls, the internal life of its buildings points in exactly the opposite direction. In fact, another reason for the site’s fame is its inhabitants’ distinctly macabre sense of interior design. If you’ve ever glimpsed the inside of a Çatalhöyük house you will never forget it: central living rooms, no more than sixteen feet across, with the skulls and horns of cattle and other creatures projecting inwards from the walls, and sometimes outwards from the fittings and furnishings. Many rooms also had vivid wall paintings and figurative mouldings, and contained platforms under which resided some portion of the household dead – remains of between six and sixty individuals in any given house – propping up the living. We can’t help recalling Maurice Sendak’s vision of a magical house where ‘the walls became the world all around’.³

如果说恰塔霍裕克的整体规划显示出一种沉闷的统一性，一个由相同的泥墙组成的迷宫，那么其建筑的内部生活则完全指向相反的方向。事实上，该遗址成名的另一个原因是其居民对内部设计的明显的恐怖感。如果你曾经瞥见过恰塔霍裕克房屋的内部，你将永远不会忘记：中央起居室，宽度不超过 16 英尺，牛和其他生物的头骨和角从墙上向内突出，有时从配件和家具向外突出。许多房间还有生动的壁画和形象化的模子，并有平台，平台下住着部分家庭死者 —— 任何一所房子里都有六到六十人的遗体 —— 支撑着生活。我们不禁想起莫里斯·森达克（Maurice Sendak）关于 “墙壁成为周围世界” 的神奇房子的设想。³

Generations of archaeologists have wanted to see Çatalhöyük as a monument to the ‘origins of farming’. Certainly, it’s easy to understand why this should be. It is among the first large settlements we know of whose inhabitants practised agriculture, and who got most of their nutrition from domesticated cereals, pulses, sheep and goats. It seems reasonable to see them, then, as the very engineers of what has been referred to since the time of V. Gordon Childe – prehistorian and author of Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942) – as the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and when first excavated in the 1960s Çatalhöyük’s remarkable material culture was interpreted in this way. Clay figurines of seated women, including a famous example flanked by felines, were understood as depictions of a Mother Goddess, presiding over the fertility of women and crops. The wall-mounted ox-skulls (‘bucrania ’ ) were assumed to be those of domestic cattle, dedicated to a taurine deity responsible for the protection and reproduction of herds. Certain buildings were identified as ‘shrines’. All this ritual life was assumed to refer to serious farming – a Neolithic pageant play, more in the spirit of Demeter than Adonis.⁴

一代又一代的考古学家都希望把恰塔霍裕克作为 “农业起源” 的纪念碑。当然，我们很容易理解为什么会这样。它是我们所知的最早的大型定居点之一，其居民从事农业生产，并从驯化的谷物、豆类、绵羊和山羊中获取大部分营养。那么，似乎有理由把他们看作是自 V·Gordon Childe（史前学家，《人类创造自己》（1936 年）和《历史上发生了什么》（1942 年）的作者）时代以来被称为 “农业革命” 的工程师，而在 20 世纪 60 年代首次发掘恰塔霍裕克的非凡物质文化时，就是这样解释的。泥塑的妇女坐像，包括一个著名的由猫科动物陪伴的坐像，被理解为对母神的描绘，主持妇女和庄稼的生育。挂在墙上的牛头骨（‘bucrania’）被认为是家畜的头骨，献给负责保护和繁殖牛群的牛神。某些建筑被认定为 “神殿”。所有这些仪式性的生活被认为是指严肃的耕作 —— 新石器时代的选美剧，更多的是以德墨忒尔的精神而不是阿多尼斯的精神。⁴

But more recent excavations suggest we have been too quick to write off Adonis.⁵ Since the 1990s, new methods of fieldwork at Çatalhöyük produced a string of surprises, which oblige us to revise both the history of the world’s oldest town and also how we think about the origins of farming in general. The cattle, it turns out, were not domestic: those impressive skulls belonged to fierce, wild aurochs. The shrines were not shrines, but houses in which people engaged in such everyday tasks as cooking, eating and crafts – just like anywhere else, except they happened to contain a larger density of ritual paraphernalia. Even the Mother Goddess has been cast into shadow. It is not so much that corpulent female figurines stopped turning up entirely in the excavations, but that the new finds tended to appear, not in shrines or on thrones, but in trash dumps outside houses with the heads broken off and didn’t really seem to have been treated as objects of religious veneration.⁶

但最近的发掘表明，我们太急于撇开阿多尼斯了。⁵自 20 世纪 90 年代以来，恰塔霍裕克的新田野工作方法产生了一连串的惊喜，使我们不得不重新审视这个世界上最古老城镇的历史，以及我们对一般农业起源的看法。事实证明，这些牛并不是家畜：那些令人印象深刻的头骨属于凶猛的野牛。祠堂不是祠堂，而是人们从事烹饪、饮食和手工艺等日常工作的房屋 —— 就像其他地方一样，只不过它们碰巧包含了更多的祭祀用品。即使是母神也被投进了阴影。这并不是说在挖掘过程中不再出现丰满的女性雕像，而是说新发现的雕像往往不是出现在神龛或宝座上，而是出现在房屋外的垃圾堆中，头部被打掉，似乎并没有真正被当作宗教崇拜的对象。⁶

Today, most archaeologists consider it deeply unsound to interpret prehistoric images of corpulent women as ‘fertility goddesses’. The very idea that they should be is the result of long-outmoded Victorian fantasies about ‘primitive matriarchy’. In the nineteenth century, it’s true, matriarchy was considered the default mode of political organization for Neolithic societies (as opposed to the oppressive patriarchy of the ensuing Bronze Age). As a result, almost every image of a fertile-looking woman was interpreted as a goddess. Nowadays, archaeologists are more likely to point out that many figurines could just as easily have been the local equivalents of Barbie dolls (the kind of Barbie dolls one might have in a society with very different standards of female beauty); or that different figurines might have served entirely different purposes (no doubt correct); or to dismiss the entire debate by insisting we simply have no idea why people created so many female images and never will, so any interpretations on offer are more likely to be projections of our own assumptions about women, gender or fertility than anything that would have made sense to an inhabitant of Neolithic Anatolia.

今天，大多数考古学家认为，将史前肥胖妇女的形象解释为 “生育女神” 是非常不可靠的。认为她们应该是这样的想法是维多利亚时代对 “原始母权制” 长期过时的幻想的结果。在 19 世纪，的确，母权制被认为是新石器时代社会的默认政治组织模式（相对于随后的青铜时代的压迫性父权制而言）。因此，几乎所有长相肥硕的女性形象都被解释为女神。如今，考古学家们更倾向于指出，许多小雕像可能很容易成为当地的芭比娃娃（在一个对女性之美的标准非常不同的社会中可能有的那种芭比娃娃）；或者不同的小雕像可能有完全不同的目的（无疑是正确的）。或者坚持认为我们根本不知道为什么人们创造了这么多的女性形象，也永远不会知道，所以任何解释都更有可能是我们自己对女性、性别或生育能力的假设的投射，而不是对新石器时代安纳托利亚的居民有意义的东西。

All of which might seem a bit pedantic, but in this hair-splitting, as we’ll see, there’s a great deal at stake.

所有这些可能看起来有点迂腐，但正如我们将看到的那样，在这种争论中，有一个很大的问题。

IN WHICH WE ENTER SOMETHING OF AN ACADEMIC NO-GO ZONE, AND DISCUSS THE POSSIBILITY OF NEOLITHIC MATRIARCHIES

其中我们进入了一个学术禁区，并讨论了新石器时代母系社会的可能性。

It’s not just the idea of ‘primitive matriarchy’ that’s become such a bugaboo today: even to suggest that women had unusually prominent positions in early farming communities is to invite academic censure. Perhaps it’s not entirely surprising. In the same way that social rebels, since the 1960s, tended to idealize hunter-gatherer bands, earlier generations of poets, anarchists and bohemians had tended to idealize the Neolithic as an imaginary, beneficent theocracy ruled over by priestesses of the Great Goddess, the all-powerful distant ancestor of Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte and Demeter herself – that is, until such societies were overwhelmed by violent, patriarchal Indo-European-speaking horse-men descending from the steppes, or, in the case of the Middle East, Semitic-speaking nomads from the deserts. How people saw this imagined confrontation became the source of a major political divide in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

今天，不仅仅是 “原始母权制” 的想法成为了一个禁忌：甚至暗示妇女在早期农业社区拥有异常突出的地位也会招致学术界的指责。也许这并不完全令人惊讶。自 20 世纪 60 年代以来，社会反叛者倾向于将狩猎采集者群体理想化，同样，前几代的诗人、无政府主义者和波希米亚人也倾向于将新石器时代理想化，认为它是由大女神的女祭司统治的想象中的、有益的神权。也就是说，直到这种社会被来自大草原的暴力的、讲父权制的印欧语的马人所淹没，或者在中东，来自沙漠的讲闪米特语的游牧民族所淹没。人们如何看待这种想象中的对抗，成为 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初主要政治分歧的根源。

To give you a flavour of this, let’s look at Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–98), considered in her lifetime one of the most prominent American feminists. Gage was also an anti-Christian, attracted to the Haudenosaunee ‘matriarchate’, which she believed to be one of the few surviving examples of Neolithic social organization, and a staunch defender of indigenous rights, so much so that she was eventually adopted as a Mohawk clan mother. (She spent the last years of her life in the home of her devoted son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books – a series of a dozen volumes in which, as many have pointed out, there are queens, good witches and princesses, but not a single legitimate male figure of authority.) In Woman, Church, and State (1893), Gage posited the universal existence of an early form of society ‘known as the Matriarchate or Mother-rule’, where institutions of government and religion were modelled on the relationship of mother to child in the household.

为了让你了解这一点，让我们看看马蒂尔达·乔斯林·盖奇（1826-98），在她生前被认为是最杰出的美洲女权主义者之一。盖奇也是一个反基督教者，被豪德诺苏尼族的 “母系社会” 所吸引，她认为那是新石器时代社会组织的少数幸存例子之一，她是原住民权利的坚定捍卫者，以至于她最终被收养为莫霍克族的母亲。 （她在她忠实的女婿 L·Frank Baum 的家里度过了她生命中的最后几年，L·Frank Baum 是《奥兹国》系列书籍的作者 —— 正如许多人指出的那样，这一系列书籍中有女王、好女巫和公主，但没有一个合法的男性权威人物。）在《妇女、教会和国家》（1893 年）中，盖奇提出了一种普遍存在的早期社会形式，“被称为母权制或母亲统治”，其中政府和宗教机构是以家庭中母亲与孩子的关系为模式。

Or consider one of Sigmund Freud’s two favourite students: Otto Gross, an anarchist who in the years before the First World War developed a theory that the superego was in fact patriarchy and needed to be destroyed so as to unleash the benevolent, matriarchal collective unconscious, which he saw as the hidden but still-living residue of the Neolithic. (This he set out to accomplish largely through the use of drugs and polyamorous sexual relationships; Gross’s work is now largely remembered for its influence on Freud’s other favourite student, Carl Jung, who kept the idea of the collective unconscious but rejected Gross’s political conclusions.) After the Great War, Nazis began to take up the same story of the ‘Aryan’ invasions from the exact opposite perspective, representing the imagined, patriarchal invaders as the ancestors of their master race.

或者考虑一下西格蒙德·弗洛伊德最喜欢的两个学生之一。奥托·格罗斯（Otto Gross）是一位无政府主义者，他在第一次世界大战前的几年里提出了一个理论，认为超我实际上是父权制，需要被摧毁，以便释放出仁慈的、母权制的集体无意识，他认为这是新石器时代隐藏的但仍然活着的残留物。（他主要通过使用药物和多角性关系来实现这一目标；格罗斯的工作现在主要是因为其对弗洛伊德的另一个最受欢迎的学生卡尔·荣格的影响而被人记住，荣格保留了集体无意识的概念，但拒绝了格罗斯的政治结论。）大战结束后，纳粹开始从完全相反的角度接手同样的 “雅利安人” 入侵的故事，将想象中的、父权制的入侵者表现为他们主人种族的祖先。

With such intense politicization of what were obviously fanciful readings of prehistory, it’s hardly surprising that the topic of ‘primitive matriarchy’ became something of an embarrassment – the intellectual equivalent of a no-go zone – for subsequent generations. But it’s hard to avoid the impression something else is going on here. The degree of erasure has been extraordinary, and far more than is warranted by mere suspicion of an overstated or outdated theory. Among academics today, belief in primitive matriarchy is treated as a kind of intellectual offence, almost on a par with ‘scientific racism’, and its exponents have been written out of history: Gage from the history of feminism, Gross from that of psychology (despite inventing such concepts as introversion and extroversion, and having worked closely with everyone from Franz Kafka and the Berlin Dadaists to Max Weber).

在对史前史进行如此强烈的政治化解读的情况下，“原始母系制” 的话题成为后世的尴尬 —— 相当于知识界的禁区 —— 也就不足为奇了。但很难避免的是，这里还发生了别的事情。抹杀的程度非同寻常，远远超过了对一个夸张或过时的理论的单纯怀疑所需要的程度。在今天的学术界，对原始母权制的信仰被视为一种智力上的犯罪，几乎与 “科学种族主义” 相提并论，其倡导者已被从历史中删除。盖奇退出了女权主义的历史，格罗斯退出了心理学的历史（尽管他发明了内向性和外向性等概念，并与从弗朗茨·卡夫卡和柏林达达主义者到马克斯·韦伯等人密切合作）。

This is odd. After all, a century or so does seem more than enough time for the dust to settle. Why is the matter still so shrouded in taboo?

这很奇怪。毕竟，一个世纪左右的时间似乎足以让尘埃落定。为什么这件事仍然被禁忌所笼罩？

Much of this present-day sensitivity stems from a backlash against the legacy of a Lithuanian-American archaeologist named Marija Gimbutas. In the 1960s and 1970s, Gimbutas was a leading authority on the later prehistory of eastern Europe. Nowadays, she is often represented as just as much of an oddball as psychiatric rebels like Otto Gross, accused of having attempted to revive the most ridiculous of old Victorian fantasies in modern guise. This is not only untrue (very few of those who dismiss her work seem to have actually read any of it), but it has created a situation where scholars find it difficult even to speculate as to how hierarchy and exploitation came to take root in the domestic sphere – unless one wants to return to Rousseau, and the simplistic notion that settled farming somehow automatically generated the power of husbands over wives and fathers over children.

今天的这种敏感性在很大程度上源于对立陶宛裔美洲考古学家 Marija Gimbutas 的遗产的反击。在 20 世纪 60 年代和 70 年代，金布塔斯是研究东欧后期史前史的主要权威。如今，她经常被视为与奥托·格罗斯（Otto Gross）等精神病学叛徒一样的怪人，被指责为试图以现代的名义恢复最荒谬的维多利亚时代的幻想。这不仅是不真实的（那些否定她的作品的人中，似乎很少有人真正读过她的作品），而且还造成了这样一种局面：学者们甚至很难推测等级制度和剥削是如何在家庭领域扎根的 —— 除非人们想回到卢梭那里，以及那种简单的概念，即定居的农业以某种方式自动产生丈夫对妻子和父亲对孩子的权力。

In fact, if you read the books of Gimbutas – such as The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1982) – you quickly realize that their author was attempting to do something which, until then, only men had been allowed to do: to craft a grand narrative for the origins of Eurasian civilization. She did so taking as her building blocks the very kind of ‘culture areas’ we discussed in the last chapter and using them to argue that, in some ways (though certainly not all), the old Victorian story about goddess-worshipping farmers and Aryan invaders was actually true.

事实上，如果你读了金布塔斯的书 —— 比如《旧欧洲的女神和上帝》（1982 年） —— 你很快就会意识到，他们的作者试图做一件在此之前只有男人才被允许做的事情：为欧亚文明的起源设计一个宏伟的叙事。她将我们在上一章中讨论的 “文化区” 作为她的基石，并利用它们来论证，在某些方面（尽管肯定不是全部），维多利亚时代关于崇拜女神的农民和雅利安入侵者的老故事实际上是真的。

Gimbutas was largely concerned with trying to understand the broad contours of a cultural tradition she referred to as ‘Old Europe’, a world of settled Neolithic villages centring on the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean (but also extending further north), in which, as Gimbutas saw it, men and women were equally valued, and differences of wealth and status were sharply circumscribed. Old Europe, by her estimation, endured from roughly 7000 BC to 3500 BC – which is, again, quite a respectable period of time. She believed these societies to be essentially peaceful, and argued that they shared a common pantheon under the tutelage of a supreme goddess, whose cult is attested in many hundreds of female figurines – some depicted with masks – found in Neolithic settlements, from the Middle East to the Balkans.⁷

Gimbutas 主要关注的是试图理解她称之为 “旧欧洲” 的文化传统的大致轮廓，这是一个以巴尔干半岛和地中海东部为中心的新石器时代定居村庄的世界（但也延伸到更北的地方），在 Gimbutas 看来，在这个世界上，男人和女人受到同等重视，财富和地位的差异被严格限制。根据她的估计，旧欧洲大约从公元前 7000 年持续到公元前 3500年 —— 这又是一段相当可敬的时间。她认为这些社会基本上是和平的，并认为他们在一位最高女神的指导下共享一个共同的万神殿，从中东到巴尔干地区的新石器时代定居点中发现的数百个女性塑像 —— 有些是带面具的 —— 都证明了对女神的崇拜。⁷

According to Gimbutas, ‘Old Europe’ came to a catastrophic end in the third millennium BC, when the Balkans were overrun by a migration of cattle-keeping peoples – the so-called ‘kurgan ’ folk – originating on the Pontic steppe, north of the Black Sea. Kurgan refers to the most archaeologically recognizable feature of these groups: earthen tumuli heaped over the graves of (typically male) warriors, buried with weapons and ornaments of gold, and with extravagant sacrifices of animals and occasionally also human ‘retainers’. All these features attested values antithetical to the communitarian ethos of Old Europe. The incoming groups were aristocratic and ‘androcratic’ (i.e., patriarchal), and were extremely warlike. Gimbutas considered them responsible for the westward spread of Indo-European languages, the establishment of new kinds of societies based on the radical subordination of women, and the elevation of warriors to a ruling caste.

根据 Gimbutas 的说法，“旧欧洲” 在公元前三千年走到了一个灾难性的尽头，当时巴尔干半岛被来自黑海以北的 Pontic 草原上的养牛民族 —— 所谓的 “Kurgan” —— 的移民所占领。库尔干人指的是这些群体在考古学上最容易辨认的特征：堆在（通常是男性）战士坟墓上的土墓，埋有武器和黄金装饰品，以及奢侈的动物祭品，偶尔也有人类 “仆人”。所有这些特征都证明了与旧欧洲的社区精神相悖的价值观。传入的群体是贵族和 “和氏璧”（即父权制），而且极其好战。金布塔斯认为他们应对印欧语言的西向传播、建立基于妇女的根本性从属地位的新型社会以及将战士提升为统治阶层负责。

As we’ve noted, all this bore a certain resemblance to the old Victorian fantasies – but there were key differences. The older version was rooted in an evolutionary anthropology that assumed matriarchy was the original condition of humankind because, at first, people supposedly didn’t understand physiological paternity and assumed women were single-handedly responsible for producing babies. This meant, of course, that hunter-gatherer communities before them should be just as matrilineal and matriarchal, if not more so, than early farmers – something many did indeed argue from first principles, despite a complete lack of any sort of evidence. Gimbutas, though, was not proposing anything of this sort: she was arguing for women’s autonomy and ritual priority in the Middle Eastern and European Neolithic. Yet by the 1990s many of her ideas had become a charter for ecofeminists, New Age religions and a host of other social movements; in turn, they inspired a slew of popular books, ranging from the philosophical to the ridiculous – and in the process became entangled with some of the more extravagant older Victorian ideas.

正如我们所注意到的，所有这些都与维多利亚时代的古老幻想有某种相似之处 —— 但也有关键的区别。旧版本植根于进化人类学，认为母权制是人类的原始状态，因为起初，人们应该不了解生理上的父子关系，并认为妇女要独自负责生产婴儿。当然，这意味着在他们之前的狩猎·采集者社区应该和早期农民一样是母系和母权制，甚至更多 —— 尽管完全缺乏任何种类的证据，但许多人确实从第一原则出发论证了这一点。然而，金布塔斯并没有提出任何这类建议：她在论证中东和欧洲新石器时代妇女的自主权和仪式优先权。然而，到 20 世纪 90 年代，她的许多想法已经成为生态女权主义者、新时代宗教和许多其他社会运动的宪章；反过来，它们又激发了一系列流行的书籍，从哲学到荒谬 —— 在这个过程中，与一些更奢侈的维多利亚时代的旧思想纠缠在一起。

Given all this, many archaeologists and historians concluded that Gimbutas was muddying the waters between scientific research and pop literature. Before long, she was being accused of just about everything the academy could think to throw at her: from cherry-picking evidence to failing to keep up with methodological advances; accusations of reverse sexism; or that she was indulging in ‘myth-making’. She was even subject to the supreme insult of public psychoanalysis, as leading academic journals published articles suggesting her theories about the displacement of Old Europe were basically phantasmagorical projections of her own tumultuous life experience, Gimbutas having fled her mother country, Lithuania, at the close of the Second World War in the wake of foreign invasions.⁸

鉴于这一切，许多考古学家和历史学家认为，金布塔斯在科学研究和流行文学之间混淆视听。不久之后，她就被指责为学术界能想到的一切：从偷换证据到未能跟上方法论的进步；被指责为反向性别歧视；或者说她沉溺于 “神话制造”。她甚至受到了公共精神分析的最高侮辱，因为主要的学术期刊发表文章，认为她关于旧欧洲的迁移的理论基本上是她自己动荡的生活经历的幻觉投射，Gimbutas 在第二次世界大战结束时在外国入侵后逃离了她的祖国立陶宛。⁸

Mercifully, perhaps, Gimbutas herself, who died in 1994, was not around to see most of this. But that also meant she was never able to respond. Some, maybe most of these criticisms had truth in them – though similar criticisms could no doubt be made of pretty much any archaeologist who makes a sweeping historical argument. Gimbutas’s arguments involved myth-making of a sort, which in part explains this wholesale takedown of her work by the academic community. But when male scholars engage in similar myth-making – and, as we have seen, they frequently do – they not only go unchallenged but often win prestigious literary prizes and have honorary lectures created in their name. Arguably Gimbutas was seen as meddling in, and quite consciously subverting, a genre of grand narrative that had been (and still is) entirely dominated by male writers such as ourselves. Yet her reward was not a literary prize, or even a place among the revered ancestors of archaeology; it was near-universal posthumous vilification, or, even worse, becoming an object of dismissive contempt.

庆幸的是，也许金布塔斯本人在 1994 年去世，没有看到这一切。但这也意味着她永远无法回应。这些批评中的一些，也许是大部分都有道理 —— 尽管类似的批评无疑可以针对几乎所有提出全面历史论证的考古学家。金布塔斯的论点涉及某种神话的制造，这在一定程度上解释了学术界对她作品的全盘否定。但是，当男性学者从事类似的神话制造时 —— 正如我们所看到的，他们经常这样做 —— 他们不仅没有受到质疑，而且经常赢得著名的文学奖，并以他们的名义开设荣誉讲座。可以说，金布塔斯被视为插手并相当有意识地颠覆了一种宏大叙事的体裁，这种体裁过去（现在仍然）完全由像我们这样的男性作家主导。然而，她的回报不是文学奖，甚至不是在受人尊敬的考古学祖先中占有一席之地；而是近乎普遍的死后中伤，或者更糟糕的是，成为被轻视的对象。

At least, until quite recently.

至少，直到最近。

Over the last few years, the analysis of ancient DNA – unavailable in Gimbutas’s time – has led a number of leading archaeologists to concede that at least one significant part of her reconstruction was probably right. If these new arguments, put forward on the basis of population genetics, are even broadly correct, then there really was an expansion of herding peoples from the grasslands north of the Black Sea around the time Gimbutas believed it to have happened: the third millennium BC . Some scholars are even arguing that massive migrations took place out of the Eurasian steppe at that time, leading to population replacement and perhaps the spread of Indo-European languages across large swathes of central Europe, just as Gimbutas envisaged. Others are far more cautious; but either way, after decades of virtual silence, people are suddenly talking about such issues, and hence about Gimbutas’s work, again.⁹

在过去的几年里，对古代DNA的分析 —— 在金姆布塔斯的时代是无法得到的 —— 已经导致一些领先的考古学家承认，她的重建至少有一个重要部分可能是正确的。如果这些在人口遗传学基础上提出的新论点是大致正确的，那么在金布塔斯认为发生的时间，即公元前三千年，确实有牧民从黑海以北的草原扩张。一些学者甚至认为，当时从欧亚草原上发生了大规模的移民，导致了人口更替，也许印欧语言在中欧的大片地区传播，就像金布塔斯设想的那样。其他人则要谨慎得多；但无论如何，在经历了几十年的实际沉默之后，人们突然又开始谈论这些问题，从而又开始谈论金布塔斯的工作。⁹

So what about the other half of Gimbutas’s argument, that Early Neolithic societies were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies? Before even beginning to answer this question, we need to clear up a few misconceptions. Gimbutas in fact never argued outright for the existence of Neolithic matriarchies. Indeed, the term seems to mean very different things to different authors. Insofar as ‘matriarchy’ describes a society where women hold a preponderance of formal political positions, one can indeed say this is exceedingly rare in human history. There are plenty of examples of individual women wielding real executive power, leading armies or creating laws, but few if any societies in which only women are normally expected to wield executive power or lead armies or create laws. Even strong queens like Elizabeth I of England, the Dowager Empress of China or Ranavalona I of Madagascar did not primarily appoint other women to be their chief advisors, commanders, judges and officials.

那么，Gimbutas 的另一半论点，即早期新石器时代的社会相对来说没有等级和阶级的问题呢？在开始回答这个问题之前，我们需要先澄清一些误解。Gimbutas 事实上从未直接论证过新石器时代母系社会的存在。事实上，这个词对不同的作者来说似乎意味着非常不同的东西。就 “母权制” 所描述的社会而言，妇女在正式的政治职位上占有优势，我们确实可以说这在人类历史上是极为罕见的。有很多女性个人掌握真正的行政权力、领导军队或制定法律的例子，但很少有社会通常期望只有女性掌握行政权力或领导军队或制定法律。即使像英国的伊丽莎白一世、中国的慈禧太后或马达加斯加的拉纳瓦罗纳一世这样强大的女王，也没有主要任命其他女性作为她们的首席顾问、指挥官、法官和官员。

In any case, another term – ‘gynarchy’, or ‘gynaecocracy’ – describes the political rule of women. The word ‘matriarchy’ means something rather different. There is a certain logic here: ‘patriarchy’, after all, refers not primarily to the fact that men wield public office, but first and foremost to the authority of patriarchs, that is, male heads of household – an authority which then acts as a symbolic model for, and economic basis of, male power in other fields of social life. Matriarchy might refer to an equivalent situation, in which the role of mothers in the household similarly becomes a model for, and economic basis of, female authority in other aspects of life (which doesn’t necessarily imply dominance in a violent or exclusionary sense), where women as a result hold a preponderance of overall day-to-day power.

在任何情况下，另一个术语 —— “妇权制”，或 “妇科制” —— 描述了妇女的政治统治。‘母权制’ 这个词的意思相当不同。这里有某种逻辑。毕竟，‘父权制’ 主要指的不是男性拥有公职的事实，而是首先指父权者的权威，即男性户主 —— 这种权威在社会生活的其他领域作为男性权力的象征模式和经济基础。母权制可能指的是一种类似的情况，在这种情况下，母亲在家庭中的作用同样成为女性在生活的其他方面的权威的模式和经济基础（这不一定意味着暴力或排他性意义上的统治），女性因此在日常的总体权力中占据了优势。

Looked at this way, matriarchies are real enough. Kandiaronk himself arguably lived in one. In his day, Iroquoian-speaking groups such as the Wendat lived in towns that were made up of longhouses of five or six families. Each longhouse was run by a council of women – the men who lived there did not have a parallel council of their own – whose members controlled all the key stockpiles of clothing, tools and food. The political sphere in which Kandiaronk himself moved was perhaps the only one in Wendat society where women did not predominate, and even so there existed women’s councils which held veto power over any decision of the male councils. On this definition, the Pueblo nations such as Hopi and Zuñi might also qualify as matriarchies, while the Minangkabau, a Muslim people of Sumatra, describe themselves as matriarchal for exactly the same reasons.¹⁰

从这个角度看，母系社会是足够真实的。Kandiaronk 本人可以说就生活在其中。在他的时代，像温达特人这样讲伊鲁古语的群体生活在由五六个家庭组成的长屋组成的城镇中。每个长屋都由一个妇女委员会管理 —— 住在那里的男人没有自己的平行委员会 —— 其成员控制着所有关键的衣服、工具和食物储备。坎迪阿伦克本人所处的政治领域也许是温达特社会中唯一一个妇女不占优势的领域，即使如此，也存在着妇女委员会，对男性委员会的任何决定拥有否决权。根据这一定义，诸如霍皮族和祖尼族这样的普埃布洛民族也可以被称为，而苏门答腊的穆斯林民族米南卡波族也因为完全相同的原因将自己描述为母系社会。¹⁰

True, such matriarchal arrangements are somewhat unusual – at least in the ethnographic record, which covers roughly the last 200 years. But once it’s clear that such arrangements can exist, we have no particular reason to exclude the possibility that they were more common in Neolithic times, or to assume that Gimbutas – by searching for them there – was doing something inherently fanciful or misguided. As with any hypothesis, it’s more a matter of weighing up the evidence.

的确，这种母系安排有些不寻常 —— 至少在人种学记录中是这样，它大约涵盖了过去的 200 年。但是，一旦明确了这种安排可以存在，我们就没有特别的理由排除它们在新石器时代更常见的可能性，或者认为金布塔斯 —— 在那里寻找它们 —— 在做一些固有的幻想或误导。与任何假设一样，这更像是一个权衡证据的问题。

Which takes us back to Çatalhöyük.

这让我们回到了恰塔霍裕克。

IN WHICH WE CONSIDER WHAT LIFE IN THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS NEOLITHIC TOWN MIGHT HAVE ACTUALLY BEEN LIKE

其中我们考虑到世界上最著名的新石器时代城镇的生活可能实际上是什么样的

Recently, a number of discoveries among the miniature art of Çatalhöyük appear to show that the female form was a special focus of ritual attention, skilled artisanship and symbolic reflection on life and death. One is a clay figure with typically corpulent female front, transitioning at the back to a carefully modelled skeleton via arms that look emaciated. Its head, now lost, was fixed into a hole at the top. Another female figurine has a tiny cavity in the centre of her back, into which a single seed from a wild plant had been placed. And within a domestic platform of the sort used for burials, excavators found one particularly revealing and exquisitely carved limestone figure of a woman. Its detailed rendering clarifies an aspect of the more common figures made in clay: the sagging breasts, drooping belly and rolls of fat appear to signify not pregnancy, as once was believed, but age.¹¹

最近，在恰塔霍裕克的微型艺术中的一些发现似乎表明，女性的形态是仪式关注的一个特别焦点，熟练的工匠精神和对生命和死亡的象征性思考。其中一个是一个泥塑，前面是典型的肥胖女性，后面通过手臂过渡到一个精心塑造的骨架，看起来很憔悴。它的头现在不见了，被固定在顶部的一个洞里。另一个女性雕像的背部中央有一个小洞，里面放着一粒野生植物的种子。在一个用于埋葬的家庭平台上，挖掘人员发现了一个特别显眼的、雕刻精美的石灰岩女性形象。它的详细渲染澄清了更常见的粘土雕像的一个方面：下垂的乳房、下垂的腹部和脂肪的滚动似乎并不像人们曾经认为的那样意味着怀孕，而是意味着年龄。¹¹

Such findings suggest that the more ubiquitous female figurines, while clearly not all objects of worship, weren’t necessarily all dolls or toys either. Goddesses? Probably not. But quite possibly matriarchs of some sort, their forms revealing an interest in female elders. And no equivalent representations of male elders have been found. Of course, this doesn’t mean we should ignore the many other Neolithic figurines that have possible phallic attributes, or mixed male-female attributes, or that are so schematic we shouldn’t really try to identify them as male or female, or even as clearly human. Similarly, the occasional links between Neolithic figurines and masking – attested both in the Middle East and eastern Europe¹² – may relate to occasions or performances where such categorical distinctions were deliberately blurred, or even inverted (not unlike, say, the masquerades of the Pacific Coast of North America, where the deities and those impersonating them were almost invariably male).

这样的发现表明，更普遍的女性塑像，虽然显然不全是崇拜对象，但也不一定全是娃娃或玩具。女神？可能不是。但很可能是某种形式的女族长，她们的形态显示出对女性长者的兴趣。而男性长者的相应表现形式还没有被发现。当然，这并不意味着我们应该忽视其他许多新石器时代的小雕像，这些雕像可能具有男性属性，或男女混合属性，或者是非常有计划性的，我们不应该真的尝试将它们识别为男性或女性，甚至是明显的人类。同样，新石器时代的小雕像和面具之间偶尔会有联系 —— 在中东和东欧都有证明¹²- 可能与这种分类区分被故意模糊，甚至颠倒的场合或表演有关（与北美太平洋海岸的化装舞会不同，那里的神灵和冒充他们的人几乎都是男性）。

There is no evidence that Çatalhöyük’s female inhabitants enjoyed better standards of living than its male ones. Detailed studies of human teeth and skeletons reveal a basic parity of diet and health, as does the ritual treatment of male and female bodies in death.¹³ Yet the point remains that there exist no similarly elaborate or highly crafted depictions of male forms in the portable art of Çatalhöyük. Wall decoration is another matter. Where coherent scenes emerge from the surviving murals, they are mainly concerned with the hunting and teasing of game animals such as boar, deer, bear and bulls. The participants are men and boys, apparently depicted in different stages of life, or perhaps entering those stages through the initiatory trials of the chase. Some of these spritely figures wear leopard skins; in one deer-baiting scene, all have beards.

没有证据表明恰塔霍裕克的女性居民比其男性居民享有更好的生活标准。对人类牙齿和骨骼的详细研究显示了饮食和健康方面的基本平等，正如男性和女性死亡时的仪式处理一样。¹³但问题是，在恰塔霍裕克的便携式艺术品中，并不存在类似的对男性形态的精心设计或高度制作的描绘。墙面装饰是另一回事。在现存的壁画中出现的连贯场景，主要是关于野猪、鹿、熊和公牛等猎物的狩猎和戏弄。参与者是男人和男孩，他们显然被描绘成处于人生的不同阶段，也可能是通过追逐的启蒙试验进入这些阶段。这些活泼的人物中有些穿着豹皮；在一个猎鹿的场景中，所有人都留着胡子。

One thing to emerge clearly from the newer investigations at Çatalhöyük is the way in which household organization permeates almost every aspect of social life. Despite the considerable size and density of the built-up area, there is no evidence for central authority. Each household appears more or less a world unto itself – a discrete locus of storage, production and consumption. Each also seems to have held a significant degree of control over its own rituals, especially where treatment of the dead was concerned, although ritual experts may of course have moved between them. While it’s unclear what social rules and habits were responsible for maintaining the autonomy of households, what seems evident is that these rules were learned mainly within the household itself; not just through its ceremonies, but also its micro-routines of cooking, cleaning floors, resurfacing walls with plaster, and so on.¹⁴ All this is vaguely reminiscent of the Northwest Coast, where society was a collection of great houses, except that the inhabitants of these Neolithic houses show no sign of being divided into ranks.

在恰塔霍裕克较新的调查中，有一点很明显，就是家庭组织几乎渗透到社会生活的各个方面。尽管建筑区的规模和密度都很大，但没有证据表明有中央权威。每户人家或多或少都是一个独立的世界 —— 一个独立的储存、生产和消费场所。每个家庭似乎都对自己的仪式有很大程度的控制，特别是在对待死者的问题上，当然，仪式专家也可能在他们之间流动。虽然目前还不清楚是什么社会规则和习惯负责维持家庭的自主性，但似乎很明显的是，这些规则主要是在家庭内部学习的；不仅是通过其仪式，还有其烹饪、清洁地板、用石膏重铺墙壁等微观程序。¹⁴所有这些都让人隐约想起西北海岸，那里的社会是一个大房子的集合，只是这些新石器时代的房子的居民没有显示出被分成等级的迹象。

The residents of Çatalhöyük seem to have placed great value on routine. We see this most clearly in the fastidious reproduction of domestic layouts over time. Individual houses were typically in use for between fifty and 100 years, after which they were carefully dismantled and filled in to make foundations for superseding houses. Clay wall went up on clay wall, in the same location, for century after century, over periods reaching up to a full millennium. Still more astonishing, smaller features such as mud-built hearths, ovens, storage bins and platforms often follow the same repetitive patterns of construction, over similarly long periods. Even particular images and ritual installations come back, again and again, in different renderings but the same locations, often widely separated in time.

恰塔霍裕克的居民似乎非常重视常规。我们从家庭布局的快速复制中最清楚地看到这一点。单个房屋通常使用 50 至 100 年，之后被小心翼翼地拆除并填埋，为下一个房屋打地基。粘土墙在同一地点，一个世纪接着一个世纪，时间长达一整千年。更令人惊讶的是，一些较小的特征，如泥土建造的炉灶、烤箱、储物箱和平台，在同样长的时间内，往往遵循同样的重复建造模式。甚至一些特定的图像和仪式装置也会一次又一次地出现在不同的效果中，但同样的地点，往往在时间上相距甚远。

Was Çatalhöyük, then, an ‘egalitarian society’? There is no sign of any self-conscious egalitarian ideal in the sense of, say, a concern with uniformity in the art, architecture or material culture; but neither are there many explicit signs of rank. Nonetheless, as individual houses built up histories, they also appear to have acquired a degree of cumulative prestige. This is reflected in a certain density of hunting trophies, burial platforms and obsidian – a dark volcanic glass, obtained from sources in the highlands of Cappadocia, some 125 miles north. The authority of long-lived houses seems consistent with the idea that elders, and perhaps elder women in particular, held positions of influence. But the more prestigious households are distributed among the less, and do not coalesce into elite neighbourhoods. In terms of gender relations, we can acknowledge a degree of symmetry, or at least complementarity. In pictorial art, masculine themes do not encompass the feminine, nor vice versa. If anything, the two domains seem to be kept apart, in different sectors of dwellings.

那么，恰塔霍裕克是一个 “平等主义社会” 吗？在艺术、建筑或物质文化的统一性方面，没有任何自觉的平等主义理想的迹象；但也没有许多明确的等级标志。尽管如此，随着个别房屋历史的建立，它们似乎也获得了一定程度的累积性威望。这反映在一定密度的狩猎战利品、墓台和黑曜石 —— 一种深色的火山玻璃，取自北部约 125 英里的卡帕多西亚高地。长寿家族的权威性似乎与长者，也许特别是长者女性拥有影响力地位的想法相一致。但较有声望的家庭分布在较少的家庭中，并没有凝聚成精英邻里。在性别关系方面，我们可以承认一定程度的对称性，或者至少是互补性。在绘画艺术中，男性的主题并不包括女性，反之亦然。如果有的话，这两个领域似乎是分开的，在住宅的不同部门。

What were the underlying realities of social life and labour at Çatalhöyük? Perhaps the most striking thing about all this art and ritual is that it makes almost no reference to agriculture. As we’ve noted, domestic cereals (wheat and barley) and livestock (sheep and goats) were far more important than wild resources in terms of nutrition. We know this because of organic remains recovered in quantity from every house. Yet for 1,000 years the cultural life of the community remained stubbornly oriented around the worlds of hunting and foraging. At this point, one has to ask how complete our picture of life at Çatalhöyük really is and where the largest gaps may lie.

恰塔霍裕克的社会生活和劳动的基本现实是什么？也许所有这些艺术和仪式中最引人注目的是，它几乎没有提到农业。正如我们所指出的，就营养而言，家养谷物（小麦和大麦）和牲畜（绵羊和山羊）比野生资源重要得多。我们之所以知道这一点，是因为从每座房子里都找到了大量的有机物。然而，一千年来，社区的文化生活仍然，顽固地围绕着狩猎和觅食的世界。在这一点上，人们不得不问，我们对恰塔霍裕克生活的描述到底有多完整，最大的差距可能在哪里。

HOW THE SEASONALITY OF SOCIAL LIFE IN EARLY FARMING COMMUNITIES MIGHT HAVE WORKED

早期农业社区的社会生活的季节性是如何运作的

Only something like 5 per cent of Neolithic Çatalhöyük has been excavated.¹⁵ Soundings and surveys offer no particular reason to believe that other parts of the town were substantially different, but it’s a reminder of how little we really know, and that we also have to think about what is missing from the archaeological record. For instance, it is clear that house floors were regularly swept clean, so the distribution of artefacts around them is far from a straightforward representation of past activities, which can only be reliably tracked through tiny fragments and residue embedded in the plaster.¹⁶ Traces have also been found of reed mats that covered living surfaces and furnishings, further disturbing the picture. We don’t necessarily know everything that was happening in the houses, or perhaps even half of it – or, indeed, how much time was actually spent living in these cramped and peculiar structures at all.

新石器时代的恰塔霍裕克只有大约 5% 的地方被挖掘出来。¹⁵探测和调查没有提供特别的理由来相信该镇的其他地区有很大的不同，但这提醒我们真正知道的东西很少，而且我们还必须思考考古记录中缺少的东西。例如，很明显，房子的地板是定期清扫的，所以周围的文物分布远不能直接代表过去的活动，只能通过嵌入石膏的微小碎片和残留物来可靠地追踪。¹⁶还发现了覆盖生活表面和家具的芦苇垫子的痕迹，进一步扰乱了画面。我们不一定知道房子里发生的所有事情，甚至可能不知道其中的一半 —— 或者说，实际上，在这些狭窄而奇特的结构中，究竟有多少时间是在居住。

In considering this, it’s worth taking a broader look at the site of Çatalhöyük in relation to its ancient surroundings, which archaeological science allows us to reconstruct, at least in outline. Çatalhöyük was situated in an area of wetlands (whence all the mud and clay) seasonally flooded by the Çarşamba River, which split its course as it entered the Konya Plain. Swamps would have surrounded the site for much of the year, interspersed with raised areas of dry land. Winters were cold and damp, summers oppressively hot. From spring to autumn, sheep and goats would have been moved between areas of pasture within the plain, and sometimes further into the highlands. Arable crops were most likely sown late in the spring on the receding floodplain of the Çarşamba, where they could ripen in as little as three months, with harvesting and processing in the late summer: fast-growing grains, in the season of Adonis.¹⁷

在考虑这个问题时，值得对恰塔霍裕克遗址与它的古代环境进行更广泛的考察，考古学允许我们至少在轮廓上进行重建。恰塔霍裕克位于一个湿地地区（所有的泥土和粘土都来自这里），季节性地被进入科尼亚平原的恰尔桑巴河淹没。沼泽地在一年中的大部分时间里都围绕着这个地方，中间夹杂着高大的旱地区域。冬天寒冷潮湿，夏天热得令人窒息。从春天到秋天，绵羊和山羊会在平原上的牧区之间移动，有时会进一步进入高地。耕地作物很可能在春末播种在卡尔桑巴河的退水平原上，它们可以在短短三个月内成熟，在夏末收获和加工：快速生长的谷物，在阿多尼斯的季节。¹⁷

While all these tasks may have taken place quite close to the town, they will inevitably have involved a periodic dispersal and reconfiguration of working arrangements and of general social affairs. And, as the rites of Adonis remind us, another kind of social life altogether may have existed on the rooftops. It is in fact quite likely that what we are seeing in the surviving remains of Çatalhöyük’s built environment are largely the social arrangements prevalent in winter, with their intense and distinctive ceremonialism focused upon hunting and the veneration of the dead. At that time of year, with the harvest in, the organization required for agricultural labour would have given way to a different type of social reality as the community’s life shrank back towards its houses, just as its herds of sheep and goats shrank back into the confines of their pens.

虽然所有这些任务都可能发生在城镇附近，但它们不可避免地涉及工作安排和一般社会事务的定期分散和重新配置。而且，正如阿多尼斯的仪式提醒我们的那样，屋顶上可能存在着另一种社会生活。事实上，我们在恰塔霍裕克建筑环境的遗迹中看到的很可能是冬季普遍存在的社会安排，其强烈而独特的仪式感集中在狩猎和对死者的敬仰。在每年的那个时候，随着收获的到来，农业劳动所需的组织会让位于另一种社会现实，因为社区的生活会缩回到它的房子里，就像它的羊群会缩回到它们的围栏里。

Seasonal variations of social structure¹⁸ were alive and well at Çatalhöyük, and these carefully balanced alternations seem central to understanding why the town endured. An impressive degree of material equality prevailed in the everyday exchanges of family life, within and between houses. Yet at the same time, hierarchy developed to slower rhythms, played out in rituals that joined the living to the dead. Shepherding and cultivation surely involved a strict division of labour, to safeguard the annual crop and protect the herds – but if so it found little space in the ceremonial life of the household, which drew its energy from older sources, more Adonis than Demeter.

社会结构的季节性变化¹⁸在恰塔霍裕克，社会结构的季节性变化是活生生的，而这些精心平衡的交替似乎是理解该镇为何能持续存在的核心。在家庭生活的日常交流中，房屋内部和房屋之间普遍存在着令人印象深刻的物质平等。然而，与此同时，等级制度的发展节奏较慢，在连接生者和死者的仪式中得到了体现。牧羊和耕种肯定涉及到严格的劳动分工，以保护每年的庄稼和保护牛群 —— 但如果是这样的话，它在家庭的仪式生活中几乎找不到空间，它从更古老的来源汲取能量，更多的是阿多尼斯而不是德墨忒尔。

A certain controversy has arisen, however, concerning just where the people of Çatalhöyük planted their crops. At first, microscopic studies of cereal remains suggested a dry-land location. Given the known extent of ancient swamps in the Konya basin, this would imply that arable fields were located at least eight miles from the town, which hardly seems plausible in the absence of donkeys or ox carts (remember, cattle were not yet domesticated in this region, let alone harnessed to anything). Subsequent analyses support a more local setting, on the alluvial soils of the Çarşamba floodplain.¹⁹ The distinction is important for a variety of reasons, not just ecological but also historical, even political, because how we picture its practical realities has direct implications for how we view the social consequences of Neolithic farming.

然而，关于恰塔霍裕克人在哪里种植庄稼的问题出现了一定的争论。起初，对谷物残骸的显微镜研究表明，这是一个旱地位置。考虑到科尼亚盆地已知的古代沼泽地的范围，这意味着可耕地距离该镇至少有 8 英里，在没有驴子或牛车的情况下，这似乎很难说得通（记住，牛在这个地区还没有被驯化，更不用说被束缚在任何东西上）。随后的分析支持更多的当地环境，即在卡尔桑巴洪泛区的冲积土壤上。¹⁹这种区分是很重要的，原因有很多，不仅是生态方面的，还有历史方面的，甚至是政治方面的，因为我们如何描绘它的实际情况，对我们如何看待新石器时代农业的社会后果有直接影响。

We must take an even broader perspective to see exactly why.

我们必须从更广泛的角度来看看到底是什么原因。

ON BREAKING APART THE FERTILE CRESCENT

关于拆分肥沃的新月地带

When Çatalhöyük was first investigated, in the 1960s, the striking discovery of houses lined with cattle skulls led many to assume, quite reasonably, that the plain of Konya was an early cradle of animal domestication. These days it is known that cattle (and boar) were first domesticated 1,000 years before Çatalhöyük was founded, and in another location altogether: around the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, which lie further east into Asia, within the area known as the Fertile Crescent. It was from that general direction that the founders of Çatalhöyük obtained the basis of their farming economy, including domestic cereals, pulses, sheep and goats. But they didn’t adopt domestic cattle or pigs. Why not?

在 20 世纪 60 年代首次对恰塔霍裕克进行调查时，令人震惊的是发现了两边都是牛头骨的房屋，这使得许多人有理由认为，科尼亚平原是早期动物驯化的摇篮。如今，人们知道，牛（和野猪）是在恰塔霍裕克建城前 1000 年首次被驯化的，而且是在另一个地方：底格里斯河和幼发拉底河流域的上游，该地区位于亚洲东部，在被称为新月沃土的地区。恰塔霍裕克的创始人正是从这个大方向上获得了他们农业经济的基础，包括家用谷物、豆类、绵羊和山羊。但他们没有采用家养的牛或猪。为什么不呢？

Since no environmental obstacles were present, one has to assume an element of cultural refusal here. The best contender for an explanation is also the most obvious. As Çatalhöyük’s art and ritual suggests, wild cattle and boar were highly valued as prey, and probably had been for as long as anyone could remember. In terms of prestige, there was much to be lost, perhaps especially for men, by the prospect of surrounding these dangerous animals with more docile, domestic varieties. Allowing cattle to remain exclusively in their ancient wild form – a big beast, but also lean, fast and highly impressive – also meant keeping intact a certain sort of human society. Accordingly, cattle remained wild and glamorous until around 6000 BC .²⁰

由于不存在环境障碍，人们不得不假设这里有文化拒绝的因素。解释的最佳人选也是最明显的。正如恰塔霍裕克的艺术和仪式所表明的那样，野牛和野猪作为猎物被高度重视，而且可能从人们有记忆以来就一直如此。就声望而言，用更温顺的家养动物包围这些危险的动物，会有很多损失，也许对男人来说尤其如此。允许牛只保持其古老的野生形态 —— 一种大型野兽，但也是瘦小、快速和令人印象深刻的 —— 也意味着保持某种人类社会的完整。因此，直到公元前 6000 年左右，牛一直保持着野生和迷人的状态。²⁰

So, what exactly is, or was, the Fertile Crescent? First, it’s important to note that this is a completely modern concept, the origins of which are as much geopolitical as environmental. The term Fertile Crescent was invented in the nineteenth century, when Europe’s imperial powers were carving up the Middle East according to their own strategic interests. Partly because of the close ties between archaeology, ancient history and the modern institutions of empire, the term became widely adopted among researchers to describe an area from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean (modern Palestine, Israel and Lebanon) to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains (roughly the Iran–Iraq border), crossing parts of Syria, Turkey and Iraq on the way. Now it is only prehistorians who still use it, to indicate the region where farming began: a roughly crescent-shaped belt of arable lands bounded by deserts and mountains.²¹

那么，新月沃土到底是什么，或者曾经是什么？首先，需要注意的是，这是一个完全现代的概念，它的起源是地缘政治和环境。新月沃土一词是在 19 世纪发明的，当时欧洲的帝国主义列强根据自己的战略利益对中东进行分割。部分原因是考古学、古代历史和现代帝国机构之间的密切联系，这个词在研究人员中被广泛采用，用来描述从地中海东岸（现代巴勒斯坦、以色列和黎巴嫩）到扎格罗斯山麓（大约是伊朗和伊拉克的边界）的地区，沿途跨越叙利亚、土耳其和伊拉克的部分地区。，现在只有史前学家仍在使用这个词，以表示农业开始的地区：一个由沙漠和山脉环绕的大致新月形的耕地地带。²¹

Yet in ecological terms, it’s really not one crescent but two – or no doubt even more, depending how closely one chooses to look. At the end of the last glacial period, around 10,000 BC, this region developed in two clearly distinct directions. Going with the topography, we can discern an ‘upland crescent’ and a ‘lowland crescent’. The upland crescent follows the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains, running north of the modern border between Syria and Turkey. For foragers at the end of the last Ice Age, it would have been something of an open frontier; an expanding belt of oak-pistachio forest and game-rich prairie intersected by river valleys.²² The lowland crescent to the south was characterized by Pistacia woodlands, as well as tracts of fertile terrain bound tightly to river systems or to the shores of lakes and artesian springs, beyond which lay deserts and barren plateaus.²³

然而，从生态学的角度来看，它确实不是一个月牙，而是两个 —— 或者毫无疑问甚至更多，这取决于人们选择如何仔细观察。在最后一个冰川期结束时，大约在公元前 10000 年，这个地区向两个明显不同的方向发展。从地形上看，我们可以看出一个 “高地新月” 和一个 “低地新月”。高地新月形沿着金牛座和扎格罗斯山脉的山麓，在现代叙利亚和土耳其之间的边界以北运行。对于上个冰河时代结束时的狩猎者来说，这将是一个开放的边界；一个不断扩大的橡树·开心果森林和富含动物的草原带，与河谷交错。²²南部的低地新月形地带的特点是有开心果林地，以及与河流系统或湖泊和自流泉岸边紧密相连的大片肥沃的土地，在这些土地之外是沙漠和贫瘠的高原。²³

Between 10,000 and 8000 BC, foraging societies in the ‘upland’ and ‘lowland’ sectors of the Fertile Crescent underwent marked transformations, but in quite different directions. The differences cannot easily be expressed in terms of modes of subsistence or habitation. In both regions, in fact, we find a complex mosaic of human settlement: villages, hamlets, seasonal camps and centres of ritual and ceremonial activity marked out by impressive public buildings. Both regions, too, have produced varying degrees of evidence for plant cultivation and livestock management, within a broader spectrum of hunting and foraging activities. Yet there are also cultural differences, some so striking as to suggest a process of schismogenesis, of the sort we described in the previous chapter. It might even be argued that, after the last Ice Age, the ecological frontier between ‘lowland’ and ‘upland’ Fertile Crescent also became a cultural frontier with zones of relative uniformity on either side, distinguished almost as sharply as the ‘Protestant foragers’ and ‘fisher kings’ of the Pacific Coast.

在公元前 10000 年到 8000 年之间，新月沃土的 “高地” 和 “低地” 的觅食社会经历了明显的转变，但方向完全不同。这些差异不容易用生存或居住模式来表达。事实上，在这两个地区，我们都发现了复杂的人类居住环境：村庄、小村庄、季节性营地以及以令人印象深刻的公共建筑为标志的仪式和礼仪活动中心。在更广泛的狩猎和觅食活动中，这两个地区也都产生了不同程度的植物种植和牲畜管理证据。然而，这两个地区也存在文化差异，有些差异非常明显，以至于表明存在着我们在前一章中描述的那种分裂过程。甚至可以说，在上个冰期之后，“低地” 和 “高地” 新月沃土之间的生态边界也成为文化边界，两边都有相对统一的区域，其区别几乎和太平洋沿岸的 “新教觅食者” 和 “渔王” 一样明显。

In the uplands, there was a striking turn towards hierarchy among settled hunter-foragers, most dramatically attested at the megalithic centre of Göbekli Tepe and at nearby sites like that recently discovered at Karahan Tepe. In the lowlands of the Euphrates and Jordan valleys, by contrast, such megalithic monuments are absent, and Neolithic societies followed a distinct but equally precocious path of change, which we will shortly describe. What’s more, these two adjacent families of societies – let’s call them ‘lowlanders’ and ‘uplanders’ – were well acquainted. We know this because they traded durable materials with each other over long distances, among them the same materials, in fact, that we found circulating as valuables on the West Coast of North America: obsidian and minerals from the mountains, and mollusc shells from the coasts. Obsidian from the Turkish highlands flowed south, and shells (perhaps used as currency) flowed north from the shores of the Red Sea, ensuring that uplanders and lowlanders stayed in touch.²⁴

在高原地区，定居的猎人·觅食者中出现了惊人的等级制度转变，Göbekli Tepe 的巨石中心和附近的遗址（如最近在 Karahan Tepe 发现的遗址）就是最显著的证明。相反，在幼发拉底河和约旦河的低地，没有这样的巨石纪念碑，新石器时代的社会遵循一个独特但同样早熟的变化路径，我们很快就会描述。更重要的是，这两个相邻的社会家族 —— 我们称它们为 “低地人” 和 “高地人” —— 是很熟悉的。我们知道这一点，因为他们远距离地相互交易耐用材料，事实上，在这些材料中，我们发现了在北美西海岸作为贵重物品流通的相同材料：山区的黑曜石和矿物，以及沿海的软体动物外壳。来自土耳其高原的黑曜石流向南方，而贝壳（也许被用作货币）从红海海岸流向北方，确保高地人和低地人保持联系。²⁴

The routes of this prehistoric trade circuit contracted as they progressed southwards into less evenly populated areas, starting at the Syrian bend of the Euphrates, winding through the Damascus basin and down into the Jordan valley. This route formed the so-called ‘Levantine Corridor’. And the lowlanders who lived here were devoted craft specialists and traders. Each hamlet seems to have developed its own expertise (stone-grinding, bead-carving, shell-processing and so on), and industries were often associated with special ‘cult buildings’ or seasonal lodges, pointing to the control of such skills by guilds or secret societies. By the ninth millennium BC, larger settlements had developed along the principal trade routes. Lowland foragers occupied fertile pockets of land among the drainages of the Jordan valley, using trade wealth to support increasingly large, settled populations. Sites of impressive scale sprang up in such propitious locations, some, such as Jericho and Basta, approaching ten hectares in size.²⁵

这个史前贸易圈的路线在向南推进到人口不太均匀的地区时有所收缩，从幼发拉底河的叙利亚拐弯处开始，蜿蜒穿过大马士革盆地，并向下进入约旦河谷。这条路线形成了所谓的 “黎凡特走廊”。而生活在这里的低地人是忠实的手工艺专家和商人。每个村落似乎都发展了自己的专长（石磨、珠子雕刻、贝壳加工等等），而且这些行业往往与特殊的 “崇拜建筑” 或季节性住所有关，表明这些技能由行会或秘密社团控制。到了公元前九千年，在主要的贸易路线上已经形成了较大的定居点。低地觅食者在约旦河谷的排水沟中占据了肥沃的小块土地，利用贸易财富来支持越来越多的定居人口。在这些有利的地方出现了规模惊人的遗址，有些遗址，如杰里科和巴斯塔，面积接近 10 公顷。²⁵

To understand the importance of trade in this process is to appreciate that the lowland crescent was a landscape of intimate contrasts and conjunctures (very similar, in this respect, to California). There were constant opportunities for foragers to exchange complementary products – which included foods, medicines, drugs and cosmetics – since the local growth cycles of wild resources were staggered by sharp differences in climate and topography.²⁶ Farming itself seems to have started in precisely this way, as one of so many ‘niche’ activities or local forms of specialization. The founder crops of early agriculture – among them emmer wheat, einkorn, barley and rye – were not domesticated in a single ‘core’ area (as once supposed), but at different stops along the Levantine Corridor, scattered from the Jordan valley to the Syrian Euphrates, and perhaps further north as well.²⁷

要理解贸易在这一过程中的重要性，就必须认识到，低地新月形地区是一个充满强烈对比和冲突的景观（在这方面，与加利福尼亚非常相似）。由于当地野生资源的生长周期因气候和地形的巨大差异而错开，因此，觅食者不断有机会交换互补产品，包括食品、药品、药物和化妆品。²⁶农业本身似乎正是以这种方式开始的，作为许多 “利基” 活动或当地的专业化形式之一。 早期农业的创始作物 —— 其中包括艾美尔小麦、艾克尔小麦、大麦和黑麦 —— 并不是在一个单一的 “核心” 地区驯化的（像曾经认为的那样），而是在黎凡特走廊的不同地点，从约旦河谷分散到叙利亚幼发拉底河，也许还包括更北的地方。²⁷

At higher altitudes, in the upland crescent, we find some of the earliest evidence for the management of livestock (sheep and goats in western Iran, cattle too in eastern Anatolia), incorporated into seasonal rounds of hunting and foraging.²⁸ Cereal cultivation began in a similar way, as a fairly minor supplement to economies based mainly on wild resources: nuts, berries, legumes and other readily accessible foodstuffs. Cultivation, however, is rarely just about calories. Cereal production also brought people together in new ways to perform communal tasks, mostly repetitive, labour-intensive and no doubt freighted with symbolic meaning; and the resulting foods were incorporated into their ceremonial lives. At the site of Jerf el-Ahmar, on the banks of the Syrian Euphrates – where upland and lowland sectors of the Fertile Crescent converge – the storage and processing of grain was associated less with ordinary dwellings than with subterranean lodges, entered from an opening in the roof and suffused with ritual associations.²⁹

在海拔较高的新月形高地，我们发现了一些最早的牲畜管理证据（伊朗西部的绵羊和山羊，安纳托利亚东部的牛），它们被纳入季节性的狩猎和觅食活动中。²⁸谷物种植也以类似的方式开始，作为主要基于野生资源的经济的一个相当小的补充：坚果、浆果、豆类和其他容易获得的食物。然而，种植很少只是为了获得卡路里。谷物生产也使人们以新的方式聚集在一起，执行社区任务，这些任务大多是重复性的、劳动密集型的，而且无疑具有象征意义；由此产生的食物被纳入他们的仪式生活中。在叙利亚幼发拉底河畔的杰夫·艾哈迈尔（Jerf el-Ahmar）遗址 —— 新月沃土的高地和低地交汇处 —— 谷物的储存和加工与其说是与普通住宅相关，不如说是与地下建筑相关，从屋顶的一个开口进入，充满了仪式感。²⁹

Before exploring some further contrasts between lowlanders and uplanders, it seems important to consider in a little more detail what these very earliest kinds of farming were actually like. To do this, we have to go deeper into the process of domestication.

在探讨低地人和高地人之间的一些进一步对比之前，似乎有必要更详细地考虑一下这些最早期的耕作方式究竟是什么样的。要做到这一点，我们必须深入了解驯化的过程。

ON SLOW WHEAT, AND POP THEORIES OF HOW WE BECAME FARMERS

关于慢速小麦，以及关于我们如何成为农民的流行理论

In crops, domestication is what happens when plants under cultivation lose features that allow them to reproduce in the wild. Among the most important is the facility to disperse seed without human assistance. In wheat, seeds growing on the stalk are contained by tiny aerodynamic capsules known as spikelets. As wild wheat ripens, the connection between spikelet and stem (an element called the rachis) shatters. The spikelets free themselves and fall to the ground. Their spiky ends penetrate the soil, deep enough for at least some seed to survive and grow (the other ends project upwards, equipped with bristle-like awns to deter birds, rodents and browsing animals).

在农作物方面，驯化是指栽培的植物失去了使其在野外繁殖的特征。其中最重要的是在没有人类帮助的情况下散播种子的能力。在小麦中，生长在茎秆上的种子被称为小穗的微小空气动力胶囊所容纳。当野生小麦成熟时，小穗和茎之间的连接（一种称为轴的元素）就会破碎。小穗释放出来，落到地上。它们的尖刺末端穿透土壤，足以让至少一些种子存活和生长（其他末端向上凸起，配备有鬃毛状突起，以阻止鸟类、啮齿动物和浏览动物）。

In domestic varieties, these aids to survival are lost. A genetic mutation takes place, switching off the mechanism for spontaneous seed dispersal and turning wheat from a hardy survivor into a hopeless dependant. Unable to separate from its mother plant, the rachis becomes a locus of attachment. Instead of spreading out to take on the big bad world, the spikelets stay rigidly fixed to the top part of the stem (the ‘ear’). And there they remain, until someone comes along to harvest them, or until they rot, or are eaten by animals. So how did these genetic and behavioural changes in crops come about, how long did it take, and what had to happen in human societies to make them possible? Historians sometimes like to turn this question on its head. It is wheat, they remind us, that has domesticated people, just as much as people ever domesticated wheat.

在国内的品种中，这些生存的辅助手段已经消失。发生了基因突变，关闭了种子自发传播的机制，使小麦从一个顽强的生存者变成一个无望的依赖者。由于无法与母株分离，轴变成了一个附着点。小穗并不向外扩展，以应对这个大坏世界，而是僵硬地固定在茎的顶部（“穗”）。它们一直呆在那里，直到有人来收获它们，或者直到它们腐烂，或者被动物吃掉。那么，作物的这些遗传和行为变化是如何产生的，花了多长时间，人类社会中又发生了什么，使之成为可能？历史学家有时喜欢把这个问题反过来问。他们提醒我们，是小麦驯化了人类，就像人类驯化了小麦一样。

Yuval Harari waxes eloquent on this point, asking us to think ‘for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat’. Ten thousand years ago, he points out, wheat was just another form of wild grass, of no special significance; but within the space of a few millennia it was growing over large parts of the planet. How did it happen? The answer, according to Harari, is that wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. ‘This ape’, he writes, ‘had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat.’ If wheat didn’t like stones, humans had to clear them from their fields; if wheat didn’t want to share its space with other plants, people were obliged to labour under the hot sun weeding them out; if wheat craved water, people had to lug it from one place to another, and so on.³⁰

尤瓦尔·哈拉里在这一点上滔滔不绝，要求我们 “从小麦的角度来思考一下农业革命”。他指出，一万年前，小麦只是另一种形式的野草，没有什么特别的意义；但在几千年的时间里，它却在地球的大部分地区生长。它是如何发生的呢？哈拉里认为，答案是，小麦通过操纵智人来实现其优势。他写道：“这种人猿”，“在大约 1 万年前，一直过着相当舒适的狩猎和采集生活，但后来开始在种植小麦方面投入越来越多的精力。如果小麦不喜欢石头，人类就必须把它们从田里清除出去；如果小麦不想与其他植物分享空间，人们就不得不在烈日下劳动，把它们除掉；如果小麦渴望水，人们就必须把它从一个地方拖到另一个地方，等等。³⁰

There’s something ineluctable about all this. But only if we accept the premise that it does in fact make sense to look at the whole process ‘from the viewpoint of wheat’. On reflection, why should we? Humans are very large-brained and intelligent primates and wheat is, well … a sort of grass. Of course, there are non-human species that have, in a sense, domesticated themselves – the house mouse and sparrow are among them, and so too probably the dog, all found, incidentally, in Early Neolithic villages of the Middle East. It’s also undoubtedly true that, over the long term, ours is a species that has become enslaved to its crops: wheat, rice, millet and corn feed the world, and it’s hard to envisage modern life without them.

这一切都有一些不可避免的东西。但前提是我们接受这样一个前提，即 “从小麦的角度” 看整个过程确实有意义。仔细想想，我们为什么要这样做？人类是大脑非常发达的智能灵长类动物，而小麦是…… 一种草。当然，从某种意义上说，有些非人类物种已经驯化了自己 —— 家鼠和麻雀是其中之一，狗也可能是其中之一，所有这些都是在中东的早期新石器时代的村庄中发现的。毋庸置疑的是，从长远来看，我们的物种已经被其作物所奴役：小麦、水稻、小米和玉米养活了世界，很难设想没有它们的现代生活。

But to make sense of the beginnings of Neolithic farming, we surely need to try and see it from the perspective of the Palaeolithic, not of the present, and still less from the viewpoint of some imaginary race of bourgeois ape-men. Of course, this is harder to do, but the alternative is to slip back into the realms of myth-making: retelling the past as a ‘just-so’ story, which makes our present situation seem somehow inevitable or preordained. Harari’s retelling is appealing, we suggest, not because it’s based on any evidence, but because we’ve heard it a thousand times before, just with a different cast of characters. In fact, many of us have been hearing it from infancy. Once again, we’re back in the Garden of Eden. Except now, it’s not a wily serpent who tricks humanity into sampling the forbidden fruit of knowledge. It’s the fruit itself (i.e. the cereal grains).

，但要理解新石器时代农业的开端，我们肯定需要尝试从旧石器时代的角度来看待它，而不是从现在的角度，更不是从一些想象中的资产阶级猿人种族的角度。当然，这是很难做到的，但另一种选择是回到神话制造的领域：把过去作为一个 “公正” 的故事来重述，这使得我们现在的情况似乎在某种程度上是不可避免的或预先注定的。我们认为，哈拉里的重述很吸引人，不是因为它基于任何证据，而是因为我们之前已经听过无数次了，只是换了一群不同的人物。事实上，我们中的许多人从婴儿期就开始听到它。我们又一次回到了伊甸园。只是现在，不是一个狡猾的蛇欺骗人类去品尝知识的禁果。而是水果本身（即谷物）。

We already know how this one goes. Humans were once living a ‘fairly comfortable life’, subsisting from the blessings of Nature, but then we made our most fatal mistake. Lured by the prospect of a still easier life – of surplus and luxury, of living like gods – we had to go and tamper with that harmonious State of Nature, and thus unwittingly turned ourselves into slaves.

我们已经知道这个问题是如何发生的。人类曾经过着 “相当舒适的生活”，靠大自然的恩赐维持生计，但后来我们犯了最致命的错误。在更容易的生活前景的诱惑下 —— 剩余和奢侈，像神一样生活 —— 我们不得不去破坏和谐的自然状态，从而不知不觉地把自己变成了奴隶。

What happens if we put aside this fable and consider what botanists, geneticists and archaeologists have found out in the past few decades? Let’s focus on wheat and barley.

如果我们抛开这个寓言，考虑一下植物学家、遗传学家和考古学家在过去几十年里的发现，会发生什么？让我们专注于小麦和大麦。

After the last Ice Age, these particular crops were among the first to be domesticated, along with lentils, flax, peas, chickpeas and bitter vetch. As we’ve noted, this process occurred in various different parts of the Fertile Crescent, rather than a single centre. Wild varieties of some of these crops grow there today, giving researchers the chance to make direct observations about how those plants behave, and even to reconstruct certain aspects of the technical process that led, 10,000 years ago, to domestication. Armed with such knowledge, they can also examine actual remains of ancient seeds and other plant remains, recovered in the many hundreds from archaeological sites in the same region. Scientists can then compare the biological process of domestication (reproduced under technological conditions similar to those of Neolithic cultivation) with the actual process that took place in prehistoric times and see how they match up.

在上个冰河时期之后，这些特殊的作物与小扁豆、亚麻、豌豆、鹰嘴豆和苦苣一起，成为第一批被驯化的作物。正如我们所指出的，这一过程发生在新月沃土的不同地区，而不是单一的中心。今天，其中一些作物的野生品种在那里生长，使研究人员有机会对这些植物的行为方式进行直接观察，甚至可以重建一万年前导致驯化的技术过程的某些方面。有了这些知识，他们还可以检查从同一地区的考古遗址中发现的数以百计的古代种子和其他植物的实际遗迹。然后，科学家们可以将驯化的生物过程（在类似于新石器时代栽培的技术条件下再现）与发生在史前时代的实际过程进行比较，看看它们如何吻合。

Once cultivation became widespread in Neolithic societies, we might expect to find evidence of a relatively quick or at least continuous transition from wild to domestic forms of cereals (which is exactly what terms like the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ lead us to think), but in fact this is not at all what the results of archaeological science show. And despite the Middle Eastern setting, those findings do not add up to anything remotely resembling a Garden of Eden-type story about how humans haplessly stumbled their way into a Faustian pact with wheat. Just how far we are (or should be) from that kind of story was already clear to researchers some decades ago, once they began comparing actual prehistoric rates of crop domestication to those achieved under experimental conditions.

一旦种植业在新石器时代的社会中得到普及，我们可能会期望找到证据，证明从野生谷物到家用谷物的相对快速或至少持续的过渡（这正是像 “农业革命” 这样的术语让我们认为的），但事实上，这根本不是考古科学的结果。尽管是在中东地区，但这些发现并不像一个伊甸园式的故事，即人类是如何无缘无故地与小麦达成浮士德式的协议。几十年前，当研究人员开始将实际的史前作物驯化率与实验条件下的驯化率进行比较时，我们离那种故事有多远（或应该有多远）已经很清楚了。

Experiments of this kind with wild wheat were first undertaken in the 1980s.³¹ What they showed was that the key genetic mutation leading to crop domestication could be achieved in as little as twenty to thirty years, or at most 200 years, using simple harvesting techniques like reaping with flint sickles or uprooting by hand. All it would have taken, then, is for humans to follow the cues provided by the crops themselves. That meant harvesting after they began to ripen, doing it in ways that left the grain on the stem (e.g. cutting or pulling, as opposed to beating grain straight off the ear with a paddle), sowing new seed on virgin soil (away from wild competitors), learning from errors, and repeating the winning formula next year. For foragers seasoned in the harvesting of wild crops, these changes need not have posed major logistical or conceptual challenges. And there may also have been other good reasons to harvest wild cereals in this manner, besides obtaining food.

在 20 世纪 80 年代首次对野生小麦进行了此类实验。³¹这些实验表明，使用简单的收割技术，如用燧石镰刀收割或用手拔草，可以在短短二三十年内实现导致作物驯化的关键基因突变，或者最多 200 年。那么，所需要的就是人类遵循作物本身所提供的提示。这意味着在作物开始成熟后进行收割，收割时要把谷物留在茎上（如切割或拔出，而不是用桨直接把谷物从穗上打下来），在处女地（远离野生竞争者）播种新的种子，从错误中学习，并在下一年重复成功的公式。对于在收获野生作物方面经验丰富的村民来说，这些变化并不需要构成重大的后勤或概念上的挑战。除了获得食物之外，以这种方式收获野生谷物还可能有其他好的理由。

Harvesting by sickle yields straw as well as grain. Today we consider straw a by-product of cereal-farming, the primary purpose being to produce food. But archaeological evidence suggests things started the other way round.³² Human populations in the Middle East began settling in permanent villages long before cereals became a major component of their diets.³³ In doing so, they found new uses for the stalks of wild grasses; these included fuel for lighting fires, and the temper that transformed mud and clay from so much friable matter into a vital tectonic resource, used to build houses, ovens, storage bins and other fixed structures. Straw could also be used to make baskets, clothing, matting and thatch. As people intensified the harvesting of wild grasses for straw (either by sickle or simply uprooting), they also produced one of the key conditions for some of these grasses to lose their natural mechanisms of seed dispersal.

用镰刀收割会产生秸秆和谷物。今天，我们认为稻草是谷物种植的副产品，主要目的是为了生产粮食。但考古学证据表明，事情的开始是相反的。³²早在谷物成为他们饮食的主要组成部分之前，中东地区的人类就已经开始在永久性村庄定居。³³在这样做的过程中，他们发现了野草茎的新用途；这些用途包括点火的燃料，以及将泥土和粘土从如此多的易碎物质转化为重要的构造资源，用于建造房屋、烤箱、储物箱和其他固定结构。稻草还可以用来制作篮子、衣服、垫子和茅草。由于人们加强了对野生草的收割，以获取秸秆（无论是用镰刀还是简单的连根拔起），他们也为一些草类失去其自然的种子传播机制创造了关键条件之一。

Now here’s the key point: if crops, rather than humans, had been setting the pace, these two processes would have gone hand in hand, leading to the domestication of large-seeded grasses within a few decades. Wheat would have gained its human handmaidens, and humans would have gained a plant resource that could be efficiently harvested with little loss of seed and that was eminently storable, but that also required much greater outlays of labour in the form of land management and the post-harvesting work of threshing and winnowing (a process which occurs naturally in wild cereals). Within a few human generations, the Faustian pact between people and crops would have been sealed. But here again, the evidence flatly contradicts these expectations.

现在的关键点是：如果是作物而不是人类在引领潮流，这两个过程就会齐头并进，在几十年内导致大种子草的驯化。小麦将获得它的人类助手，而人类将获得一种可以有效收割且种子损失很小的植物资源，这种资源非常容易储存，但也需要更多的劳动力，如土地管理和收割后的脱粒和绞碎工作（这一过程自然发生在野生谷物中）。在几代人的时间里，人与作物之间的浮士德式契约就会被封死。但在这里，证据又与这些期望完全相悖。

In fact, the latest research shows that the process of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent was not fully completed until much later: as much as 3,000 years after the cultivation of wild cereals first began.³⁴ (Once again, to get a sense of the scale here, think: the time between the putative Trojan War and today.) And while some modern historians may allow themselves the luxury of disposing with ‘a few short millennia’ here or there, we can hardly extend this attitude to the prehistoric actors whose lives we are trying to understand. At this point, you might reasonably ask what we mean by ‘cultivation’, and how we can possibly know when it began, if it didn’t lead to clear changes in the reproductive behaviour of wild plants? The answers lie in weeds (and in research methods dreamed up in an inventive sub-branch of archaeology, known as ‘archaeobotany’).

事实上，最新的研究表明，新月沃土的植物驯化过程直到很晚才完全完成：在首次开始种植野生谷物后的 3000 年。³⁴（再一次，为了了解这里的规模，可以想想：从假定的特洛伊战争到今天的时间。）虽然一些现代历史学家可能允许自己在这里或那里奢侈地处理 “短短的几千年”，但我们很难将这种态度延伸到我们试图了解其生活的史前行动者。在这一点上，你可能会合理地问，我们所说的 “栽培” 是什么意思，如果它没有导致野生植物繁殖行为的明显变化，我们怎么可能知道它是什么时候开始的？答案在于杂草（以及考古学的一个创造性分支 —— “考古植物学” —— 所梦想的研究方法）。

WHY NEOLITHIC FARMING TOOK SO LONG TO EVOLVE, AND DID NOT, AS ROUSSEAU IMAGINED, INVOLVE THE ENCLOSURE OF FIXED FIELDS

为什么新石器时代的农业发展了这么久，而且并不像卢梭想象的那样，涉及到固定田地的圈地问题？

Since the early 2000s, archaeobotanists have been studying a phenomenon known as ‘pre-domestication cultivation’. Cultivation in general refers to the work done by humans to improve the life chances of favoured crops, whether these be wild or domestic. This usually involves, at minimum, clearing and tilling the soil. Soil preparation induces changes in the size and shape of wild cereal grains, though such changes need not lead to domestication (basically they just get bigger). It also attracts other flora that flourish in disturbed soils, including arable weeds such as clover, fenugreek, gromwell and indeed members of the colourful crowfoot family (genus Adonis! ), quick to flower and just as quick to die.

自 21 世纪初以来，考古植物学家一直在研究一种被称为 “驯化前栽培” 的现象。栽培在，一般是指人类为改善所喜爱的作物的生活机会所做的工作，无论这些作物是野生还是家养的。这通常至少包括开垦和翻耕土壤。土壤整理会使野生谷物的大小和形状发生变化，尽管这种变化不一定导致驯化（基本上它们只是变得更大）。它还吸引了其他在受干扰土壤中生长的植物群，包括耕地杂草，如三叶草、葫芦巴、龙葵，以及色彩斑斓的乌贼家族成员（Adonis属！），它们开花快，死亡也快。

Since the 1980s, researchers have accumulated statistical evidence from prehistoric sites in the Middle East, analysing this evidence for changes over time in grain size and proportions of arable weed flora. Samples now number in the many tens of thousands. What they show is that, in certain parts of the region such as northern Syria, the cultivation of wild cereals dates back at least to 10,000 BC .³⁵ Yet in these same regions, the biological process of crop domestication (including the crucial switch-over from brittle rachis to tough) was not completed until closer to 7000 BC – that is roughly ten times as long as it need have taken – if, that is, humans really had stumbled blindly into the whole process, following the trajectory dictated by changes in their crops.³⁶ To be clear: that’s 3,000 years of human history, far too long to constitute an ‘Agricultural Revolution’ or even to be considered some kind of transitional state on the road to farming.

自 20 世纪 80 年代以来，研究人员积累了来自中东史前遗址的统计证据，分析了这些证据在谷物大小和耕地杂草植物群比例方面随时间的变化。现在的样本数量已达数万。它们显示，在该地区的某些地方，如叙利亚北部，野生谷物的种植至少可以追溯到公元前 10000 年。³⁵然而，在这些地区，作物驯化的生物过程（包括从脆性轴到韧性的关键转换）直到接近公元前 7000 年才完成 —— 这大约是它所需时间的 10 倍 —— 如果，人类真的盲目地进入整个过程，遵循作物变化所决定的轨迹。³⁶说白了：这就是 3000 年的人类历史，对于构成 “农业革命” 或甚至被认为是耕作道路上的某种过渡状态来说，时间太长。

To us, with our Platonic prejudices, all this looks like a very long and unnecessary delay, but clearly it was not experienced that way by people in Neolithic times. We need to understand this 3,000-year period as an important phase of human history in its own right. It’s a phase marked by foragers moving in and out of cultivation – and as we’ve seen, there’s nothing unusual or anomalous about this flirting and tinkering with the possibilities of farming, in just the ways Plato would have despised – but in no way enslaving themselves to the needs of their crops or herds. So long as it didn’t become too onerous, cultivation was just one of many ways in which early settled communities managed their environments. Separating wild and domestic plant populations need not have been a major concern for them, even if it appears that way to us.³⁷

对我们来说，带着柏拉图式的偏见，这一切看起来是非常漫长和不必要的拖延，但显然新石器时代的人们并没有这样的经历。我们需要把这三千年的时期理解为人类历史上的一个重要阶段。这是一个以觅食者进出耕种为标志的阶段 —— 正如我们所看到的，这种以柏拉图会鄙视的方式对耕种的可能性进行的调戏和修补并没有什么不寻常或反常的地方 —— 但绝不是将自己奴役于作物或畜群的需要。只要不是太繁重，种植只是早期定居社区管理其环境的众多方式之一。对他们来说，分离野生和家养植物种群并不是一个主要的问题，即使在我们看来是这样。³⁷

On reflection, this approach makes perfectly good sense. Cultivating domestic cereals, as the ‘affluent’ foragers of the Pacific Coast knew well, is enormously hard work.³⁸ Serious farming meant serious soil maintenance and weed clearance. It meant threshing and winnowing after harvest. All these activities would have got in the way of hunting, wild food collection, craft production, marriages and any number of other things, not to mention storytelling, gambling, travelling and organizing masquerades. Indeed, to balance out their dietary needs and labour costs, early cultivators may even have strategically chosen practices that worked against the morphological changes which signal the onset of domestication in plants.³⁹

仔细想想，这种做法是完全有道理的。正如太平洋沿岸的 “富裕的” 觅食者所熟知的那样，耕种家用谷物是非常辛苦的工作。³⁸严肃的耕作意味着严肃的土壤维护和杂草清理。这意味着收获后要进行脱粒和绞碎。所有这些活动都会妨碍打猎、收集野生食物、制作工艺品、结婚和其他任何事情，更不用说讲故事、赌博、旅行和组织化妆舞会了。事实上，为了平衡他们的饮食需求和劳动成本，早期的耕种者甚至可能战略性地选择了与植物驯化开始时的形态变化相反的做法。³⁹

This balancing act involved a special kind of cultivation, which brings us back full circle to Çatalhöyük and its wetland location. Called ‘flood retreat’, ‘flood recession’ or décrue farming, it takes place on the margins of seasonally flooding lakes or rivers. Flood-retreat farming is a distinctly lackadaisical way to raise crops. The work of soil preparation is given over mostly to nature. Seasonal flooding does the work of tillage, annually sifting and refreshing the soil. As the waters recede they leave behind a fertile bed of alluvial earth, where seed can be broadcast. This was garden cultivation on a small scale with no need for deforestation, weeding or irrigation, except perhaps the construction of small stone or earthen barriers (‘bunds’) to nudge the distribution of water this way or that. Areas of high groundwater, such as the edges of artesian springs, could also be exploited in this way.⁴⁰

这种平衡行为涉及一种特殊的耕作方式，这使我们回到恰塔霍裕克和它的湿地位置。这种耕作被称为 “退洪”、“退洪” 或 “退耕”，发生在季节性泛滥的湖泊或河流的边缘。洪水退却耕作是一种明显缺乏耐心的农作物种植方式。整理土壤的工作主要交给了大自然。季节性的洪水做着耕作的工作，每年对土壤进行筛选和更新。当水退去时，它们留下了肥沃的冲积土床，可以在那里播种。这是小规模的花园式种植，不需要砍伐森林、除草或灌溉，也许只需要建造小型的石头或土质障碍物（“堤坝”），使水的分布向这边或那边倾斜。高地下水的地区，如自流泉的边缘，也可以用这种方式开发。⁴⁰

In terms of labour, flood-retreat farming is not only pretty light, it also requires little central management. Critically, such systems have a kind of inbuilt resistance to the enclosure and measurement of land. Any given parcel of territory might be fertile one year, and then either flooded or dried out the next, so there is little incentive for long-term ownership or enclosure of fixed plots. It makes little sense to set up boundary stones when the ground itself is shifting underneath you. No form of human ecology is ‘innately’ egalitarian, but much as Rousseau and his epigones would have been surprised to hear it, these early cultivation systems did not lend themselves to the development of private property. If anything, flood-retreat farming was practically oriented towards the collective holding of land, or at least flexible systems of field reallocation.⁴¹

就劳动力而言，退水耕作不仅相当轻便，而且也不需要什么中央管理。最重要的是，这种系统对圈地和测量土地有一种内在的阻力。任何一块土地都可能在某一年是肥沃的，然后在下一年被水淹没或干涸，所以没有什么动力去长期拥有或圈定固定的地块。当土地本身在你脚下移动时，设立界石是没有意义的。没有哪种形式的人类生态是 “天生的” 平等主义，但正如卢梭和他的后裔们听到的那样，这些早期的耕作系统并不适合私有财产的发展。如果有的话，退水耕作实际上是以集体持有土地为导向的，或者至少是灵活的田地再分配制度。⁴¹

Flood-retreat farming was an especially important feature of Early Neolithic economies in the more arid, lowland sectors of the Fertile Crescent, and particularly the Levantine Corridor, where important sites often developed on the margins of springs or lakes (e.g. Jericho, Tell Aswad) or on riverbanks (e.g. Abu Hureyra, Jerf el-Ahmar). Because the densest stands of wild grain crops actually lay in upland areas with higher rainfall, the inhabitants of such lowland sites had opportunities to isolate cultivated from wild stock, setting in motion a process of divergence and domestication by gathering grains from the highlands and broadcasting them in lowland, flood-retreat areas. This makes the extremely long timescale of cereal domestication more striking still. Early cultivators, it seems, were doing the minimum amount of subsistence work needed to stay in their given locations, which they occupied for reasons other than farming: hunting, foraging, fishing, trading and more.

在新月沃土较干旱的低地地区，特别是在黎凡特走廊，退洪农业是早期新石器时代经济的一个特别重要的特征，那里的重要遗址往往在泉水或湖泊的边缘（如杰里科，Tell Aswad）或河岸（如 Abu Hureyra, Jerf el-Ahmar）发展。由于野生粮食作物最密集的地方实际上是在降雨量较高的高地，这些低地的居民有机会将栽培的粮食和野生的粮食隔离开来，通过从高地采集粮食并在低地、洪水退去的地区播种，启动了一个分化和驯化的过程。这使得谷物驯化的极长的时间尺度更加引人注目。早期的耕种者，似乎是在做维持生计所需的最低限度的工作，他们占据这些地方的原因并不是为了耕种：打猎、觅食、捕鱼、贸易等等。

ON WOMAN, THE SCIENTIST

关于女人，科学家

Rejecting a Garden of Eden-type narrative for the origins of farming also means rejecting, or at least questioning, the gendered assumptions lurking behind that narrative.⁴² Apart from being a story about the loss of primordial innocence, the Book of Genesis is also one of history’s most enduring charters for the hatred of women, rivalled only (in the Western tradition) by the prejudices of Greek authors like Hesiod, or for that matter Plato. It is Eve, after all, who proves too weak to resist the exhortations of the crafty serpent and is first to bite the forbidden fruit, because she is the one who desires knowledge and wisdom. Her punishment (and that of all women following her) is to bear children in severe pain and live under the rule of her husband, whose own destiny is to subsist by the sweat of his brow.

拒绝伊甸园式的农耕起源叙事也意味着拒绝或至少质疑潜伏在该叙事背后的性别假设。⁴²创世纪》除了是一个关于失去原始纯真的故事外，也是历史上最持久的仇恨妇女的宪章之一，（在西方传统中）只有希腊作家如赫西奥德或柏拉图的偏见可以与之匹敌。毕竟，是夏娃证明了她太软弱，无法抵抗狡猾的蛇的劝告，并首先咬了禁果，因为她是渴望知识和智慧的人。她的惩罚（以及所有跟随她的妇女的惩罚）是在严重的痛苦中生孩子，并生活在她丈夫的统治之下，而她丈夫自己的命运是靠汗水来维持生计。

When today’s writers speculate about ‘wheat domesticating humans’ (as opposed to ‘humans domesticating wheat’), what they are really doing is replacing a question about concrete scientific (human) achievements with something rather more mystical. In this view, we’re not asking questions about who might actually have been doing all the intellectual and practical work of manipulating wild plants: exploring their properties in different soils and water regimes; experimenting with harvesting techniques, accumulating observations about the effects these all have on growth, reproduction and nutrition; debating the social implications. Instead, we find ourselves waxing lyrical about the temptations of forbidden fruits and musing on the unforeseen consequences of adopting a technology (agriculture) that Jared Diamond has characterized – again, with biblical overtones – as ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’.⁴³

当今天的作家推测 “小麦驯化人类”（而不是 “人类驯化小麦”）时，他们所做的实际上是用更神秘的东西取代了关于具体科学（人类）成就的问题。在这种观点中，我们不是在问究竟是谁在做操纵野生植物的所有智力和实践工作：探索它们在不同土壤和水环境中的特性；实验收获技术，积累关于这些对生长、繁殖和营养的影响的观察结果；辩论其社会影响。相反，我们发现自己在抒发禁果的诱惑，思考采用一种技术（农业）所带来的不可预见的后果，贾里德·戴蒙德（Jared Diamond）再次以圣经的口吻将其描述为 “人类历史上最严重的错误”。⁴³

Consciously or not, it is the contributions of women that get written out of such accounts. Harvesting wild plants and turning them into food, medicine and complex structures like baskets or clothing is almost everywhere a female activity, and may be gendered female even when practised by men. This is not quite an anthropological universal, but it’s about as close to one as you are ever likely to get.⁴⁴ Hypothetically, of course, it is possible that things haven’t always been so. It’s even conceivable that the current situation is really the result of some great global switch-around of gender roles and language structures that took place in the last few thousand years – but one would imagine that such an epochal change would have left other traces, and no one has so much as suggested what such traces might be. True, archaeological evidence of any kind is hard to come by, because aside from charred seeds, very little of what was done culturally with plants survives from prehistoric times. But where evidence exists, it points to strong associations between women and plant-based knowledge as far back as one can trace such things.⁴⁵

无论是否有意识地，妇女的贡献都会被写进这些叙述中。收获野生植物并将其变成食物、药品和复杂的结构，如篮子或衣服，几乎在任何地方都是女性的活动，即使是由男性从事的活动，也可能是女性的性别。这不完全是人类学的普遍现象，但它是你有可能得到的最接近的一种现象。⁴⁴当然，从假设的角度来看，事情有可能并非一直如此。甚至可以想象，目前的情况确实是在过去几千年里发生的性别角色和语言结构的某种伟大的全球转换的结果 —— 但我们可以想象，这样一个时代的变化会留下其他的痕迹，而没有人提出这样的痕迹可能是什么。诚然，任何种类的考古证据都很难得到，因为除了烧焦的种子，史前时代在文化上对植物所做的事情几乎没有遗留。但是，在有证据的地方，它指出了妇女和基于植物的知识之间的密切联系，因为人们可以追溯到这种事情。⁴⁵

By plant-based knowledge we don’t just mean new ways of working with wild flora to produce food, spices, medicines, pigments or poisons. We also mean the development of fibre-based crafts and industries, and the more abstract forms of knowledge these tend to generate about properties of time, space and structure. Textiles, basketry, network, matting and cordage were most likely always developed in parallel with the cultivation of edible plants, which also implies the development of mathematical and geometrical knowledge that is (quite literally) intertwined with the practice of these crafts.⁴⁶ Women’s association with such knowledge extends back to some of the earliest surviving depictions of the human form: the ubiquitous sculpted female figurines of the last Ice Age with their woven headgear, string skirts and belts made of cord.⁴⁷

我们所说的以植物为基础的知识并不仅仅是指利用野生植物生产食物、香料、药物、颜料或毒药的新方法。我们还指以纤维为基础的手工艺和工业的发展，以及这些往往产生的关于时间、空间和结构特性的更抽象的知识形式。纺织品、篮子、网络、垫子和绳索很可能总是与可食用植物的种植同步发展，这也意味着数学和几何知识的发展，这些知识与这些手工艺的实践交织在一起（相当地）。⁴⁶妇女与这些知识的联系可以追溯到一些现存的最早的人类形态的描述：最后一个冰河时代无处不在的女性雕塑，她们有编织的头饰、线裙和用绳索制成的腰带。⁴⁷

There is a peculiar tendency among (male) scholars to skip over the gendered aspects of this kind of knowledge or veil it in abstractions. Consider Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous comments on the ‘savage mind’, those ‘Neolithic scientists’ he imagined as having created a parallel route of discovery to modern science, but one that started from concrete interactions with the natural world rather than generalizing laws and theorems. The former method of experimentation proceeds ‘from the angle of sensible qualities’, and according to Lévi-Strauss it flowered in the Neolithic period, giving us the basis of agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, weaving, conservation and preparation of food, etc.; while the latter mode of discovery, starting from the definition of formal properties and theories, only came to fruition much more recently, with the advent of modern scientific procedures.⁴⁸

在（男性）学者中，有一种特殊的倾向，即跳过这种知识的性别方面，或以抽象的方式掩盖它。考虑到 Claude Lévi-Strauss 关于 “野蛮人思想” 的著名评论，他想象那些 “新石器时代的科学家” 创造了一条与现代科学平行的发现之路，但这条路是从与自然世界的具体互动开始的，而不是概括性的规律和定理。前一种实验方法是 “从感性品质的角度” 进行的，根据列维·斯特劳斯的说法，它在新石器时代开花结果，为我们提供了农业、畜牧业、陶器、编织、保存和准备食物等的基础；而后一种发现模式，从形式属性和理论的定义出发，只是在最近，随着现代科学程序的出现才有了成果。⁴⁸

Nowhere in The Savage Mind – a book ostensibly dedicated to understanding that other sort of knowledge, the Neolithic ‘science of the concrete’ – does Lévi-Strauss even mention the possibility that those responsible for its ‘flowering’ might, very often, have been women.

在《野蛮人的心灵》 —— 这本书表面上致力于理解另一种知识，即新石器时代的 “具体科学” —— 中，列维·斯特劳斯甚至没有提到负责其 “开花” 的人可能经常是妇女的可能性。

If we take these kinds of considerations (instead of some imaginary State of Nature) as our starting point, then entirely different sorts of questions arise about the invention of Neolithic farming. In fact, a whole new language becomes necessary to describe it, since part of the problem with conventional approaches lies in the very terms ‘agriculture’ and ‘domestication’. Agriculture is essentially about the production of food, which was just one (quite limited) aspect of the Neolithic relationship between people and plants. Domestication usually implies some form of domination or control over the unruly forces of ‘wild nature’. Feminist critiques have already done much to unpack the gendered assumptions behind both concepts, neither of which seems appropriate to describe the ecology of early cultivators.⁴⁹

如果我们把这些考虑（而不是一些想象中的自然状态）作为我们的出发点，那么关于新石器时代农业的发明就会出现完全不同的问题。事实上，有必要用一种全新的语言来描述它，因为传统方法的部分问题在于 “农业” 和 “驯化” 这两个术语本身。农业本质上是关于食物的生产，这只是新石器时代人与植物之间关系的一个方面（相当有限）。驯化通常意味着对 “野生自然” 的不规则力量的某种形式的支配或控制。女权主义的批评已经做了很多工作来解读这两个概念背后的性别化假设，这两个概念似乎都不适合描述早期耕种者的生态学。⁴⁹

What if we shifted the emphasis away from agriculture and domestication to, say, botany or even gardening? At once we find ourselves closer to the realities of Neolithic ecology, which seem little concerned with taming wild nature or squeezing as many calories as possible from a handful of seed grasses. What it really seems to have been about is creating garden plots – artificial, often temporary habitats – in which the ecological scales were tipped in favour of preferred species. Those species included plants that modern botanists separate out into competing classes of ‘weeds’, ‘drugs’, ‘herbs’ and ‘food crops’, but which Neolithic botanists (schooled by hands-on experience, not textbooks) preferred to grow side by side.

如果我们把重点从农业和驯化转移到植物学甚至园艺上，会怎么样？我们立刻发现自己更接近新石器时代生态学的现实，它似乎并不关心驯服野生自然或从一小撮草籽中榨取尽可能多的热量。 它真正关心的似乎是创建花园地块 —— 人工的、通常是临时的栖息地 —— 其中的生态天平向首选物种倾斜。这些物种包括现代植物学家将其分为 “杂草”、“药物”、“草药” 和 “粮食作物” 等竞争类别的植物，但新石器时代的植物学家（通过实践经验而不是教科书学习）更喜欢将这些植物并排种植。

Instead of fixed fields, they exploited alluvial soils on the margins of lakes and springs, which shifted location from year to year. Instead of hewing wood, tilling fields and carrying water, they found ways of ‘persuading’ nature to do much of this labour for them. Theirs was not a science of domination and classification, but one of bending and coaxing, nurturing and cajoling, or even tricking the forces of nature, to increase the likelihood of securing a favourable outcome.⁵⁰ Their ‘laboratory’ was the real world of plants and animals, whose innate tendencies they exploited through close observation and experimentation. This Neolithic mode of cultivation was, moreover, highly successful.

他们没有固定的田地，而是利用湖泊和泉水边缘的冲积土，这些地方每年都会有变化。他们不再砍伐木材、耕地和运水，而是找到了 “说服” 大自然为他们做这些劳动的方法。他们的科学不是支配和分类，而是弯曲和哄骗，培育和劝说，甚至欺骗自然的力量，以增加获得有利结果的可能性。⁵⁰他们的 “实验室” 是真实的植物和动物世界，他们通过仔细观察和实验来利用这些植物和动物的先天倾向。此外，这种新石器时代的耕作模式是非常成功的。

In lowland regions of the Fertile Crescent, such as the Jordan and Euphrates valleys, ecological systems of this kind fostered the incremental growth of settlements and populations for three millennia. Pretending it was all just some kind of very extended transition or rehearsal for the advent of ‘serious’ agriculture is to miss the real point. It’s also to ignore what to many has long seemed an obvious connection between Neolithic ecology and the visibility of women in contemporary art and ritual. Whether one calls these figures ‘goddesses’ or ‘scientists’ is perhaps less important than recognizing how their very appearance signals a new awareness of women’s status, which was surely based on their concrete achievements in binding together these new forms of society.

在新月沃土的低地地区，如约旦河和幼发拉底河流域，这种生态系统促进了三千年来定居点和人口的逐步增长。假装这一切只是某种非常漫长的过渡或为 “严肃的” 农业的出现而进行的预演，是忽略了真正的问题。这也是忽略了对许多人来说，新石器时代的生态和妇女在当代艺术和仪式中的能见度之间长期以来似乎存在的明显联系。无论人们把这些人物称为 “女神” 还是 “科学家”，也许都不如认识到她们的出现是如何预示着对妇女地位的新认识，这肯定是基于她们在将这些新的社会形式结合在一起的具体成就。

Part of the difficulty with studying scientific innovation in prehistory is that we have to imagine a world without laboratories; or rather, a world in which laboratories are potentially everywhere and anywhere. Here Lévi-Strauss is much more on the ball:

研究史前科学创新的部分困难在于，我们必须想象一个没有实验室的世界；或者说，一个实验室有可能无处不在、无处不有的世界。在这一点上，列维·斯特劳斯做得更到位。

… there are two distinct modes of scientific thought. These are certainly not a function of different stages of development of the human mind but rather of two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the imagination: the other at a remove from it. It is as if the necessary connections which are the object of all science, Neolithic or modern, could be arrived at by two different routes, one very close to, and the other more remote from, sensible intuition.⁵¹

…… 有两种不同的科学思想模式。这当然不是人类心灵的不同发展阶段的功能，而是自然界可供科学探究的两个战略层面：一个与感知和想象力的层面大致相适应：另一个与之相距甚远。就好像作为所有科学对象的必要联系，无论是新石器时代还是现代科学，都可以通过两种不同的途径来实现，一种非常接近感性的直觉，另一种则与之相距较远。⁵¹

Lévi-Strauss, as we noted, called the first route to discovery a ‘science of the concrete’. And it’s important to recall that most of humanity’s greatest scientific discoveries – the invention of farming, pottery, weaving, metallurgy, systems of maritime navigation, monumental architecture, the classification and indeed domestication of plants and animals, and so on – were made under precisely those other (Neolithic) sorts of conditions. Judged by its results, then, this concrete approach was undeniably science. But what does ‘science of the concrete’ actually look like, in the archaeological record? How can we hope to see it at work, when so many thousands of years stand between us and the processes of innovation we are trying to understand? The answer here lies precisely in its ‘concreteness’. Invention in one domain finds echoes and analogies across a whole range of others, which might otherwise seem completely unrelated.

正如我们所指出的，列维·斯特劳斯将第一条发现之路称为 “具体的科学”。重要的是要记住，人类最伟大的科学发现 —— 农耕、陶器、编织、冶金、航海系统、纪念碑式建筑、植物和动物的分类和驯化等等的发明，正是在这些其他（新石器时代）的条件下完成的。那么，从其结果来看，这种具体的方法不可否认是科学。但是，在考古记录中，“具体的科学” 到底是什么样子的？当我们与我们试图理解的创新过程之间隔着几千年的时间时，我们怎么能希望看到它在工作？这里的答案正是在于它的 “具体性”。一个领域的发明可以在一系列其他领域中找到呼应和类比，否则这些领域可能看起来完全不相关。

We can see this clearly in Early Neolithic cereal cultivation. Recall that flood-retreat farming required people to establish durable settlements in mud-based environments, like swamps and lake margins. Doing so meant becoming intimate with the properties of soils and clays, carefully observing their fertility under different conditions, but also experimenting with them as tectonic materials, or even as vehicles of abstract thought. As well as supporting new forms of cultivation, soil and clay – mixed with wheat and chaff – became basic materials of construction: essential in building the first permanent houses; used to make ovens, furniture and insulation – almost everything, in fact, except pottery, a later invention in this part of the world.

我们可以在新石器时代早期的谷物种植中清楚地看到这一点。回顾一下，洪水退去后的农业要求人们在以泥土为基础的环境中建立持久的定居点，如沼泽和湖边。这样做意味着要亲近土壤和粘土的特性，仔细观察它们在不同条件下的肥力，而且还要把它们作为构造材料，甚至作为抽象思维的载体进行试验。除了支持新的耕作形式外，土壤和粘土 —— 与小麦和谷壳混合 —— 成为基本的建筑材料：在建造第一批永久性房屋时必不可少；用于制造烤箱、家具和绝缘材料 —— 事实上，除了陶器，几乎所有东西都是后来在世界这个地区发明的。

But clay was also used, in the same times and places, to (literally) model relationships of utterly different kinds, between men and women, people and animals. People started using its plastic qualities to figure out mental problems, making small geometric tokens that many see as direct precursors to later systems of mathematical notation. Archaeologists find these tiny numerical devices in direct association with figurines of herd animals and full-bodied women: the kind of miniatures that stimulate so much modern speculation about Neolithic spirituality, and which find later echoes in myths about the demiurgic, life-giving properties of clay.⁵² As we’ll soon see, earth and clay even came to redefine relationships between the living and the dead.

但是，在同样的时间和地点，粘土也被用来模拟完全不同的关系，在男人和女人、人和动物之间。人们开始利用粘土的可塑性来解决心理问题，制作小的几何符号，许多人认为这是后来数学系统的直接先兆， 符号。考古学家发现，这些微小的数字装置与牲畜和成年妇女的塑像直接相关：这种微型模型激发了现代人对新石器时代精神的猜测，并在后来关于粘土的炼狱和生命属性的神话中找到了回声。⁵²我们很快就会看到，土和粘土甚至重新定义了生者和死者之间的关系。

Seen this way, the ‘origins of farming’ start to look less like an economic transition and more like a media revolution, which was also a social revolution, encompassing everything from horticulture to architecture, mathematics to thermodynamics, and from religion to the remodelling of gender roles. And while we can’t know exactly who was doing what in this brave new world, it’s abundantly clear that women’s work and knowledge were central to its creation; that the whole process was a fairly leisurely, even playful one, not forced by any environmental catastrophe or demographic tipping point and unmarked by major violent conflict. What’s more, it was all carried out in ways that made radical inequality an extremely unlikely outcome.

这样看来，“农业的起源” 开始不像是经济转型，而更像是一场媒体革命，这也是一场社会革命，涵盖了从园艺到建筑、从数学到热力学、从宗教到性别角色重塑的一切。虽然我们不能确切地知道谁在这个勇敢的新世界里做了什么，但非常清楚的是，妇女的工作和知识是其创造的核心；整个过程是一个相当悠闲的，甚至是嬉戏的过程，没有被任何环境灾难或人口临界点所强迫，也没有重大的暴力冲突。更重要的是，这一切都以使激进的不平等成为极不可能的结果的方式进行的。

All this applies most clearly to the development of Early Neolithic societies in lowland parts of the Fertile Crescent, and especially along the valleys of the Jordan and Euphrates Rivers. But these communities did not develop in isolation. For almost the entire period we’ve been discussing, the upland crescent – following the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains and the adjoining steppe – was also home to settled populations, adept in managing a variety of wild plant and animal resources. They too were often village dwellers, who adopted strategies of cultivation and herding as they saw fit, while still deriving the bulk of their diet from non-domesticated species. But in other ways they are clearly marked out from their lowland neighbours, their construction of megalithic architecture, including the famous structures of Göbekli Tepe, being just the most obvious. Some of these groups lived in proximity to lowland Neolithic societies, especially along the upper reaches of the Euphrates, but their art and ritual suggest a radically different orientation to the world, as sharply distinguished from the latter as Northwest Coast foragers were from their Californian neighbours.

所有这些都最清楚地适用于新月沃土低地的新石器时代早期社会的发展，特别是沿约旦河和幼发拉底河的山谷。但这些社区并不是孤立地发展的。几乎在我们讨论的整个时期，新月高地 —— 沿着金牛座和扎格罗斯山的山麓以及毗邻的草原 —— 也是定居人口的家园，他们善于管理各种野生植物和动物资源。他们通常也是村落居民，在他们认为合适的情况下采取种植和放牧的策略，同时仍然从非驯化物种中获取大部分饮食。但在其他方面，他们与他们的低地邻居有明显的区别，他们建造的巨石建筑，包括著名的 Göbekli Tepe 建筑，就是最明显的例子。其中一些群体生活在低地新石器时代社会的附近，尤其是幼发拉底河上游一带，但他们的艺术和仪式表明他们对世界的取向完全不同，就像西北海岸的觅食者与加利福尼亚的邻居一样，与后者有着鲜明的区别。

TO FARM OR NOT TO FARM: IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD (WHERE WE RETURN TO GÖBEKLI TEPE)

耕种或不耕种。这一切都在你的脑海中（我们回到戈拜克利特佩）。

At the frontier between the upland and lowland sectors of the Fertile Crescent stands Göbekli Tepe itself. It is actually one of a series of megalithic centres that sprang up around the Urfa valley, near the modern border of Syria and Turkey, in the ninth millennium BC .⁵³ Most are still not excavated. Only the tops of their great T-shaped pillars can be seen projecting from the deep valley soils. While direct evidence is still lacking, this style of stone architecture probably marks the apex of a building tradition that began in timber. Wooden prototypes may also lie behind Göbekli Tepe’s tradition of sculptural art, which evokes a world of fearsome images, far removed from the visual arts of the lowlands, with their humble figurines of women and domestic animals, and hamlets of clay.

在新月沃土的高地和低地的交界处，矗立着戈拜克里特佩本身。它实际上是公元前九千年在现代叙利亚和土耳其边界附近的乌尔法河谷周围出现的一系列巨石中心之一。⁵³大多数仍然没有被挖掘出来。只能看到他们巨大的 T 形石柱的顶端从深谷的土壤中伸出来。虽然仍然缺乏直接的证据，但这种石头建筑风格可能标志着始于木材的建筑传统的顶点。Göbekli Tepe 的雕塑艺术传统背后可能也有木质原型，它唤起了一个可怕的形象世界，与低地的视觉艺术相去甚远，低地的妇女和家畜雕像以及泥土小村都是简陋的。

In both medium and message, Göbekli Tepe could hardly be more different from the world of early farming communities. Its standing remains were wrought from stone, a material little used for construction in the Euphrates and Jordan valleys. Carved on these stone pillars is an imagery dominated by wild and venomous animals; scavengers and predators, almost exclusively sexed male. On a limestone pillar a lion rears up in high relief, teeth gnashing, claws outstretched, penis and scrotum on show. Elsewhere lurks a malevolent boar, its male sex also displayed. The most often repeated images depict raptors taking human heads. One remarkable sculpture, resembling a totem pole, comprises superimposed pairings of victims and predators: disembodied skulls and sharp-eyed birds of prey. Elsewhere, flesh-eating birds and other carnivores are shown grasping, tossing about or otherwise playing with their catch of human crania; carved below one such figure on a monumental pillar is the image of a headless man with an erect penis (conceivably this depicts the kind of immediate post-mortem erection or ‘priapism’ that occurs in victims of hanging or beheading as a result of massive trauma to the spinal cord).⁵⁴

在媒介和信息方面，Göbekli Tepe 与早期农业社区的世界没有什么不同。它的遗迹是由石头锻造而成的，这种材料在幼发拉底河和约旦河谷很少用于建筑。在这些石柱上雕刻的是以野生和有毒动物为主的图像；食腐动物和掠食者，几乎都是雄性。在一根石灰石柱子上，一头狮子高高耸立，咬牙切齿，伸出爪子，阴茎和阴囊都露了出来。在其他地方潜伏着一只邪恶的野猪，它的雄性也被展示出来。最经常重复的画面是描绘猛禽取人头。有一个引人注目的雕塑，类似于图腾柱，由受害者和捕食者的叠加组合组成：没有实体的头骨和目光锐利的捕食者。在其他地方，食肉鸟和其他食肉动物被显示为抓取、抛掷或以其他方式玩弄它们捕获的人类头颅；在一个不朽的柱子上，一个这样的人物下面刻着一个无头的人，他的阴茎勃起（可以想象，这描绘了那种死后立即勃起或 “priapism”，在绞刑或斩首的受害者身上发生，因为脊髓受到巨大创伤的结果）。⁵⁴

What are these images telling us? Could the taking of trophy heads among upland populations of the steppe-forest zone be part of the picture? At the settlement of Nevalı Çori – also in Urfa province, and with similar monuments to Göbekli Tepe – burials with detached skulls were found, including one of a young woman with a flint dagger still lodged under her jaw; while from Jerf el-Ahmar – on the Upper Euphrates, where the lowland crescent approaches the uplands – comes the startling find of a splayed skeleton (again, a young woman) still lying inside a burnt-down building, prone and missing her head.⁵⁵ At Göbekli Tepe itself, the chopping of human heads was mimicked in statuary: anthropomorphic sculptures were made, only to have their tops smashed off and the stone heads buried adjacent to pillars within the shrines.⁵⁶ For all this, archaeologists remain rightly cautious about linking such practices to conflict or predation; so far, there is only limited evidence for interpersonal violence, let alone warfare at this time.⁵⁷

这些图像告诉我们什么？在草原·森林地带的高地人口中，取用战利品的头颅会不会是的一部分？在 Nevalı Çori 定居点 —— 也是在乌尔法省，有与 Göbekli Tepe 类似的纪念碑 —— 发现了带有分离的头骨的墓葬，包括一个年轻妇女，她的下巴下还插着一把燧石匕首；而在 Jerf el-Ahmar —— 幼发拉底河上游，低地新月形地区接近高地的地方，发现了一个惊人的发现，一具被打翻的骨架（还是一个年轻妇女）仍然躺在一栋被烧毁的建筑物里，俯卧着，没有头。⁵⁵在 Göbekli Tepe 本身，砍人头的行为被模仿成了雕像：拟人化的雕塑被制作出来，只是它们的顶部被砸掉了，石头被埋在神龛的柱子旁边。⁵⁶对于这一切，考古学家对于将这种做法与冲突或掠夺联系起来仍然保持着正确的谨慎态度；到目前为止，只有有限的证据表明人际间的暴力，更不用说此时的战争了。⁵⁷

Here we might also consider evidence from Çayönü Tepesi, in the Ergani plain. This was the site of a large prehistoric settlement comprising substantial houses built on stone foundations, as well as public buildings. It lay on a tributary of the Tigris in the hill country of Diyarbakır, not far north of Göbekli Tepe, and was established around the same time by a community of hunter-foragers and sometime herders.⁵⁸ Near the centre of the settlement stood a long-lived structure that archaeologists call the ‘House of Skulls’, for the simple reason that it was found to hold the remains of over 450 people, including headless corpses and over ninety crania, all crammed into small compartments. Cervical vertebrae were attached to some skulls, indicating they were severed from fleshed (but not necessarily living) bodies. Most of the heads were taken from young adults or adolescents, individuals in the prime of life, and ten from children. If any of these were trophy skulls, claimed from victims or enemies, then they were chosen for their vitality. The skulls were left bare, with no trace of decoration.⁵⁹

在这里，我们也可以考虑来自埃尔干尼平原的恰尤努·特佩西的证据。这是一个大型史前定居点的所在地，包括建在石基上的大量房屋以及公共建筑。它位于迪亚巴克尔山地的底格里斯河支流上，在戈贝利特佩北部不远处，大约在同一时期由狩猎者和牧民组成的社区建立。⁵⁸在定居点的中心附近有一个长期存在的建筑，考古学家称之为 “头骨之家”，原因很简单，它被发现容纳了超过 450 人的遗体，包括无头尸体和超过 90 个头骨，都挤在小隔间里。一些头骨上附有颈椎骨，表明它们是从有肉的（但不一定是活的）身体上割下来的。大多数头颅取自青壮年或青少年，正值壮年的人，还有 10 个取自儿童。如果这些是战利品的头骨，是从受害者或敌人身上取得的，那么它们被选中是因为它们有活力。这些头骨都是裸露的，没有任何装饰的痕迹。⁵⁹

Human remains in the House of Skulls were stored together with those of large prey animals, and a wild cattle skull was mounted on an outside wall. In its later stages of use, the building was furnished with a polished stone table, erected near the entrance in an open plaza that could have hosted large gatherings. Studies of blood residues from the surface, and from associated objects, led researchers to identify this as an altar on which public sacrifice and processing of bodies took place, the victims both animal and human. Whether or not the detail of this reconstruction is correct, the association of vanquished animals and human remains is suggestive. The House of Skulls met its end in a violent conflagration, after which the people of Çayönü covered the whole complex under a deep blanket of pebbles and soil.

骷髅屋中的人类遗骸与大型猎物的遗骸存放在一起，一个野牛头骨被安装在外面的墙上。在使用的后期阶段，该建筑配备了一张磨光的石桌，竖立在靠近入口的一个开放广场上，可以举办大型聚会。对表面的血液残留物和相关物品的研究，使研究人员确定这是一个祭坛，在这里进行公共祭祀和处理尸体，受害者包括动物和人类。无论这种重建的细节是否正确，被征服的动物和人类遗骸的关联是有提示性的。骷髅屋在一场激烈的大火中灭亡，之后恰尤努人将整个建筑群覆盖在一块深深的卵石和土壤之下。

Perhaps what we’re detecting in the House of Skulls, but in a rather different form, is a complex of ideas already familiar from Amazonia and elsewhere: hunting as predation, shifting subtly from a mode of subsistence to a way of modelling and enacting dominance over other human beings. After all, even feudal lords in Europe tended to identify themselves with lions, hawks and predatory beasts (they were also fond of the symbolism of putting heads on poles; ‘off with his head!’ is still the most popular phrase identified with the British monarchy).⁶⁰ But what about Göbekli Tepe itself? If the display of trophy heads really was an important aspect of the site’s function, surely some direct trace would remain, other than just some suggestive stone carvings.

也许我们在 “骷髅屋” 中发现的，只是以一种相当不同的形式，是亚马逊和其他地方已经熟悉的思想的综合体：狩猎作为捕食，从一种生存模式巧妙地转变为一种塑造和制定对其他人类的统治的方式。毕竟，即使是欧洲的封建领主也倾向于将自己与狮子、鹰和掠夺性野兽联系起来（他们也喜欢把头放在柱子上的象征意义；“砍掉他的头！” 仍然是英国君主制最流行的说法）。⁶⁰但是 Göbekli Tepe 本身呢？如果战利品头颅的展示真的是该遗址功能的一个重要方面，那么除了一些暗示性的石刻外，肯定还会有一些直接的痕迹。

Human remains are so far rare at Göbekli Tepe. Which makes it even more remarkable that – of the few hundred scraps of prehistoric human bone so far recovered from the site – some two-thirds are indeed segments of skulls or facial bones, some retaining signs of de-fleshing, and even decapitation. Among them were found remnants of three skulls, recovered from the area of the stone shrines, which bear evidence for more elaborate types of cultural modification in the form of deep incisions and drill-holes, allowing the skull to dangle from a string or be mounted on a pole.⁶¹

到目前为止，人类遗骸在 Göbekli Tepe 是非常罕见的。这使得它更加引人注目 —— 在迄今为止从该遗址中发现的几百块史前人类骨骼碎片中，大约三分之二确实是头骨或面部骨骼的片段，有些还保留着去肉的痕迹，甚至是斩首的痕迹。在这些头骨中，有三个头骨的残余，是在石制神龛区域发现的，这些头骨有证据表明有更复杂的文化改造类型，其形式是深切口和钻孔，使头骨可以悬挂在绳子上或安装在柱子上。⁶¹

In earlier chapters, we’ve explored why farming was much less of a rupture in human affairs than we tend to assume. Now we’re finally in a position to bring the various strands of this chapter together and say something about why this matters. Let’s recap.

在前几章中，我们已经探讨了为什么农耕在人类事务中的断裂远没有我们倾向于假设的那么严重。现在，我们终于可以把这一章的各个部分结合起来，说一说为什么这很重要。让我们来回顾一下。

Neolithic farming began in Southwest Asia as a series of local specializations in crop-raising and animal-herding, scattered across various parts of the region, with no epicentre. These local strategies were pursued, it seems, in order to sustain access to trade partnerships and optimal locations for hunting and gathering, which continued unabated alongside cultivation. As we discussed back in Chapter One, this ‘trade’ might well have had more to do with sociability, romance or adventure than material advantage as we’d normally conceive it. Still, whatever the reasons, over thousands of years such local innovations – everything from non-shattering wheat to docile sheep – were exchanged between villages, producing a degree of uniformity among a coalition of societies across the Middle East. A standard ‘package’ of mixed farming emerged, from the Iranian Zagros to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and then spread beyond it, albeit, as we’ll see, with very mixed success.

新石器时代的农业开始于西南亚，是一系列散布在该地区不同地方的农作物种植和动物饲养的地方性专业，没有中心。这些地方战略似乎是为了维持贸易伙伴关系和最佳的狩猎和采集地点，而狩猎和采集与耕作同时进行，没有丝毫停顿。正如我们在第一章所讨论的那样，这种 “贸易” 很可能与社交、浪漫或冒险有关，而不是与我们通常所设想的物质利益有关。，不过，不管是什么原因，数千年来，这种地方创新 —— 从不碎的小麦到温顺的羊 —— 在村庄之间交换，在整个中东的社会联盟中产生了一定程度的统一性。一个标准的混合农业 “套餐” 出现了，从伊朗扎格罗斯到地中海东岸，然后再向外传播，尽管正如我们将看到的那样，成功率很低。

But from its earliest beginnings, farming was much more than a new economy. It also saw the creation of patterns of life and ritual that remain doggedly with us millennia later, and have since become fixtures of social existence among a broad sector of humanity: everything from harvest festivals to habits of sitting on benches, putting cheese on bread, entering and exiting via doorways, or looking at the world through windows. Originally, as we’ve seen, much of this Neolithic lifestyle developed alongside an alternative cultural pattern in the steppe and upland zones of the Fertile Crescent, most clearly distinguished by the building of grand monuments in stone, and by a symbolism of male virility and predation that largely excluded female concerns. By contrast, the art and ritual of lowland settlements in the Euphrates and Jordan valleys presents women as co-creators of a distinct form of society – learned through the productive routines of cultivation, herding and village life – and celebrated by modelling and binding soft materials, such as clay or fibres, into symbolic forms.⁶²

但从最早的开始，农耕就不仅仅是一种新的经济。它还见证了生活和仪式模式的产生，这些模式在几千年后仍然与我们形影不离，并成为广大人类社会生存的固定模式：从收获节到坐在长椅上的习惯，把奶酪放在面包上，通过门洞进出，或通过窗户看世界。最初，正如我们所看到的，这种新石器时代的生活方式大部分是与新月沃土的草原和高原地区的另一种文化模式一起发展起来的，最明显的特征是用石头建造宏伟的纪念碑，以及男性阳刚之气和掠夺的象征主义，在很大程度上排除了女性的关注。相比之下，幼发拉底河和约旦河谷的低地定居点的艺术和仪式将妇女作为一种独特的社会形式的共同创造者 —— 通过耕种、放牧和村庄生活的生产程序来学习 —— 并通过将粘土或纤维等软材料塑造成象征性的形式来庆祝。⁶²

Of course, we could put these cultural oppositions down to coincidence, or perhaps even environmental factors. But considering the close proximity of the two cultural patterns, and how the groups responsible for them exchanged goods and were keenly aware of each other’s existence, it is equally possible, and perhaps more plausible, to see what happened as the result of mutual and self-conscious differentiation, or schismogenesis, akin to what we traced in the last chapter among the recent foraging societies of America’s West Coast. The more that uplanders came to organize their artistic and ceremonial lives around the theme of predatory male violence, the more lowlanders tended to organize theirs around female knowledge and symbolism – and vice versa. With no written sources to guide us, the clearest evidence we can find for such mutual oppositions is when things get (quite literally, in our case) turned on their head, as when one group of people seems to make a great display of going against some highly characteristic behaviour of their neighbours.

当然，我们可以把这些文化的对立归结为巧合，甚至可能是环境因素。但是，考虑到这两种文化模式的密切关系，以及负责这两种文化模式的群体是如何进行商品交换和敏锐地意识到对方的存在的，我们同样有可能，而且也许更有道理，把所发生的事情看作是相互和自我意识的分化的结果，或者说是分裂的发生，类似于我们在上一章中追踪的美洲西海岸近期的觅食社会的情况。高地人越是围绕男性掠夺性暴力的主题来组织他们的艺术和仪式生活，低地人就越倾向于围绕女性知识和象征主义来组织他们的生活 —— 反之亦然。由于没有书面资料来指导我们，我们能找到的关于这种相互对立的最清楚的证据是，当事情被颠覆（在我们的例子中，是真的被颠覆）的时候，比如当，一群人似乎大张旗鼓地反对他们邻居的一些高度特征的行为。

Such evidence is not at all hard to find, since lowland villagers, like their upland neighbours, also attached great ritual significance to human heads, but chose to treat them in ways that would have been utterly foreign to the uplanders. Let us briefly illustrate what we mean.

这样的证据一点也不难找到，因为低地村民和他们的高地邻居一样，也非常重视人头的仪式感，但他们选择的处理方式对高地人来说是完全陌生的。让我们简单地说明一下我们的意思。

Perhaps the most recognizable – and definitely the most macabre – objects found in Early Neolithic villages of the Levantine Corridor (Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and the Syrian Euphrates) are ‘skull portraits’. These are heads that were removed from burials of women, men and occasionally children in a secondary process, after the corpse had decomposed. Once separated from the body, they were cleaned and carefully modelled over with clay, then coated with layers of plaster to become something altogether different. Shells were often fixed into the eye sockets, just as clay and plaster filled in for the flesh and skin. Red and white paint added further life. Skull portraits appear to have been treasured heirlooms, carefully stored and repaired over generations. They reached their height of popularity in the eighth millennium BC, as Göbekli Tepe fell into decline, when the practice spread as far as Çatalhöyük; there, one such modelled head was found in an intimate situation, clutched to the chest of a female burial.⁶³

在黎凡特走廊（以色列、巴勒斯坦、约旦、黎巴嫩和叙利亚幼发拉底河）的新石器时代早期村庄发现的最容易辨认的 —— 也是最可怕的 —— 物品也许是 “头骨画像”。这些头颅是在尸体腐烂后，在第二道工序中从妇女、男子以及偶尔从儿童的墓葬中取出的。一旦与尸体分离，它们就被清洗干净，并用粘土仔细塑形，然后再涂上一层石膏，成为完全不同的东西。贝壳通常被固定在眼窝里，就像粘土和石膏填补了肉和皮肤一样。红色和白色的油漆进一步增加了生命力。骷髅头像似乎是珍贵的传家宝，几代人都小心翼翼地保存和修复着。它们在公元前八千年达到了流行的顶峰，因为戈贝利特佩逐渐衰落，当时这种做法一直传播到恰塔霍裕克；在那里，有一个这样的头像被发现在一个亲密的场合，紧紧地抱在一个女性的胸前。⁶³

Ever since these intriguing objects first came to light at Jericho in the early twentieth century, archaeologists have puzzled over their meaning. Many scholars see them as expressions of care and reverence for ancestors. But there are literally countless ways one might show respect or grief for ancestors without systematically removing crania from their places of rest and modelling life into them by adding layers of clay, plaster, shell, fibre and pigment. Even in the lowland parts of the Fertile Crescent, this treatment was reserved for a minority of individuals. More often, human crania removed from burials were left bare, while others had complex histories as ritual objects, such as a group of skulls from Tell Qarassa in southern Syria, found to have been deliberately mutilated around the face in what appears to have been an act of post-mortem desecration.⁶⁴

自从二十世纪初在杰里科首次发现这些耐人寻味的物品以来，考古学家们一直对它们的意义感到困惑。许多学者认为它们表达了对祖先的关怀和敬意。但是，人们可以用无数种方式来表达对祖先的尊重和哀悼，而不需要系统地将头骨从其安放的地方移走，并通过添加粘土、石膏、贝壳、纤维和颜料层来塑造其生命。即使在新月沃土的低地，这种处理方式也只保留给少数人。更常见的情况是，从墓葬中取出的人的头骨是裸露的，而其他的头骨则有复杂的历史，如叙利亚南部 Tell Qarassa 的一组头骨，发现其面部周围被故意残缺，这似乎是一种死后的亵渎行为。⁶⁴

In the Jordan and Euphrates valleys and adjacent coastlands, the practice of curating human crania has an even longer history, extending back to Natufian hunter-gatherers, before the onset of the Neolithic period; but longevity need not imply an entirely local context for later ritual innovations, such as the addition of decorative materials to make skull portraits. Perhaps making skull portraits in this particular way was not just about reconnecting with the dead, but also negating the logic of stripping, cutting, piercing and accumulating heads as trophies. At the very least, it offers a further indication that lowland and upland populations in the Fertile Crescent were following quite different – and in some ways, mutually opposed – cultural trajectories throughout the centuries when plants and animals were first domesticated.⁶⁵

在约旦和幼发拉底河流域以及邻近的海岸地区，策划人类头骨的做法甚至有更长的历史，可以追溯到 Natufian 狩猎采集者，在新石器时代开始之前；但悠久的历史并不一定意味着后来的仪式创新完全是在当地背景下进行的，例如添加装饰材料来制作头骨肖像。也许以这种特殊的方式制作头骨画像，不仅仅是为了与死者重新建立联系，也是为了否定剥离、切割、刺穿和积累头部作为战利品的逻辑。至少，这进一步表明，在植物和动物首次被驯化的几个世纪里，新月沃土的低地和高地人口遵循着相当不同的 —— 在某些方面是相互对立的 —— 文化轨迹。⁶⁵

ON SEMANTIC SNARES AND METAPHYSICAL MIRAGES

关于语义陷阱和形而上学的幻觉

Back in the 1970s, a brilliant Cambridge archaeologist called David Clarke predicted that, with modern research, almost every aspect of the old edifice of human evolution, ‘the explanations of the development of modern man, domestication, metallurgy, urbanization and civilization – may in perspective emerge as semantic snares and metaphysical mirages.’⁶⁶ It is beginning to seem like he was right.

早在 20 世纪 70 年代，一位杰出的剑桥大学考古学家大卫·克拉克（David Clarke）预言，随着现代研究的开展，人类进化的古老大厦的几乎每一个方面，“对现代人的发展、驯化、冶金、城市化和文明的解释 —— 可能会在视角上出现语义上的陷阱和形而上学的幻觉。⁶⁶现在看来，他是对的。

Let’s recap a little further. A founding block in that old edifice of human social evolution was the allocation of a specific place in history to foraging societies, which was to be the prelude to an ‘Agricultural Revolution’ that supposedly changed everything about the course of history. The job of foragers in this conventional narrative is to be all that farming is not (and thus also to explain, by implication, what farming is). If farmers are sedentary, foragers must be mobile; if farmers actively produce food, foragers must merely collect it; if farmers have private property, foragers must renounce it; and if farming societies are unequal, this is by contrast with the ‘innate’ egalitarianism of foragers. Finally, if a particular group of foragers should happen to possess any such features in common with farmers, the dominant narrative demands that these can only be ‘incipient’, ‘emergent’ or ‘deviant’ in nature, so that the destiny of foragers is either to ‘evolve’ into farmers, or eventually to wither and die.

让我们再回顾一下。在人类社会进化的古老大厦中，有一块基石是为觅食社会分配了一个特定的历史位置，这将是 “农业革命” 的前奏，据说它改变了历史进程的一切。在这种传统的叙述中，觅食者的工作是成为农业所不具备的一切（因此也暗示着解释农业是什么）。如果农民是定居的，觅食者就必须是流动的；如果农民积极生产食物，觅食者就必须只是收集食物；如果农民有私有财产，觅食者就必须放弃它；如果农业社会是不平等的，这与觅食者的 “天生” 平等主义形成对比。最后，如果一个特定的觅食者群体碰巧拥有任何与农民共同的特征，主流叙事要求这些特征只能是 “初生”、“出现” 或 “偏离” 性质的，因此觅食者的命运要么是 “进化” 为农民，要么最终枯萎和死亡。

It will by now be increasingly obvious to any reader that almost nothing about this established narrative matches the available evidence. In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, long regarded as the cradle of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, there was in fact no ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic forager to Neolithic farmer. The transition from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production took something in the order of 3,000 years. And while agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after its inception. In the centuries between, people were effectively trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you will, switching between modes of production, much as they switched their social structures back and forth.

现在，任何读者都会越来越清楚地看到，这种既定的叙述几乎，与现有的证据完全不符。在长期被视为 “农业革命” 摇篮的中东新月沃土上，事实上并没有出现从旧石器时代的觅食者到新石器时代的农民的 “转变”。从主要依靠野生资源生活到以粮食生产为基础的生活，需要 3000 年左右的时间。虽然农业允许财富更不平等的集中，但在大多数情况下，这只是在农业开始后的几千年才开始发生。在这之间的几个世纪里，人们实际上是在尝试农业的大小，如果你愿意的话，是在生产模式之间进行转换，就像他们来回转换他们的社会结构一样。

Clearly, it no longer makes any sense to use phrases like ‘the Agricultural Revolution’ when dealing with processes of such inordinate length and complexity. And since there was no Eden-like state from which the first farmers could take their first steps on the road to inequality, it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of social rank, inequality or private property. In the Fertile Crescent, it is – if anything – among upland groups, furthest removed from a dependence on agriculture, that we find stratification and violence becoming entrenched; while their lowland counterparts, who linked the production of crops to important social rituals, come out looking decidedly more egalitarian; and much of this egalitarianism relates to an increase in the economic and social visibility of women, reflected in their art and ritual. In that sense, the work of Gimbutas – while painted with brush strokes that were broad, sometimes to the point of caricature – was not entirely wide of the mark.

显然，在处理如此冗长和复杂的过程时，使用 “农业革命” 这样的短语已经没有任何意义了。由于没有类似伊甸园的状态，第一批农民可以在通往不平等的道路上迈出第一步，所以谈论农业标志着社会等级、不平等或私有财产的起源，就更没有意义了。在新月沃土，我们发现在远离农业依赖的高地群体中，分层和暴力变得根深蒂固；而将作物生产与重要的社会仪式联系在一起的低地同行，看起来显然更加平等；这种平等主义在很大程度上与妇女的经济和社会知名度的提高有关，反映在她们的艺术和仪式上。在这个意义上，金布塔斯的作品 —— 虽然用笔画得很宽泛，有时甚至到了漫画的地步 —— 并不完全是广义的。

All this raises an obvious question: if the adoption of farming actually set humanity, or some small part of it, on a course away from violent domination, what went wrong?